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User and entity behavior analytics for information security specialist Securonix announced a partnership with ThetaPoint, a provider of strategic consulting and managed security services.
Together, the companies plan to offer security solutions that predict, prevent and detect cyber-threats to enterprise security.
ThetaPoint helps customers plan, build and run security information and event management (SIEM) and log management platforms and works with technology providers to align capabilities to customers’ needs.
Its platform combines technical expertise with an ability to solve business challenges for customers in the commercial and public sector, according to the company.
“ThetaPoint is an expert in SIEM, from implementation to full operations and administration. They partner with Fortune 500 commercial entities and large government agencies,” Paul Bihuniak, chief operating officer for ThetaPoint, told eWEEK. “Their clients are keenly aware of today’s threat landscape and have asked them to help identify areas of exposure or weakness in their current SIEM infrastructure to help them monitor this risk.”
To deliver more content and value to their security operations team, ThetaPoint and Securonix plan to deliver advanced use cases for customers to mitigate the security risk posed by users both internal and external to the organization, he said.
“The No. 1 stumbling block organizations face is hiring and retaining the talent required to effectively drive a security strategy,” Bihuniak said. “There is a massive skills shortage in IT security and, as such, organizations are constantly fighting an uphill battle to be able to rapidly and efficiently identify, respond and protect their entities against advanced threats.”
Assuming an organization has the talent it needs to effectively drive a security strategy, he said, predictable and repeatable business processes are the next big stumbling block in executing that strategy.
“Without proper processes, efficiencies and economies of scale cannot be derived and organizations will receive minimum value from the tools and technologies that they have invested in,” he noted.
Securonix applies analytical capabilities to existing security management tools to extract actionable security intelligence from the data generated by SIEMs, security logs, non-traditional data sources such as HR information, industry-specific applications and additional data sources.
Its unsupervised machine-learning engine continuously analyzes volumes of data to establish baselines of normal behavior and flags high-risk behavior outliers.
Bihuniak noted there are two very important reasons to consider security analytics as a way to mitigate risk to an organization.
“Organizations have grown via mergers and acquisitions and, as such, have a variety of disparate systems for identity management, and correlating across those systems for access management is challenging, at best, and impossible, at worst,” he said.
Second, businesses continue to collect volumes of logs and events from their systems, with little to no value being derived from their efforts.
“Helping organizations mine that data to uncover outliers is critical to mitigate the risk of advanced threats to an organization,” he said.