Security engineering and operations

Understanding the assets within your technology landscape is foundational to effectively implementing continuous active service reduction (ASR) capabilities. Knowledge of which assets support mission-critical systems or store valuable business information helps an organization focus efforts while triaging incidents and better isolates the impact of those events. Maintaining a robust asset inventory is a difficult and tedious task that can be challenging to execute without the help of IT asset management and configuration management database technologies. A well-defined risk-based classification scheme is necessary to effectively prioritize protection and recovery efforts.

RSM’s asset management specialists help organizations discover, classify and continually manage their IT asset inventories to support more effective ASR activities. Our team will work with you in areas such as:

• Ensuring continuous discovery scanning that identifies new and changed assets, leading to improved visibility into assets within the environment
• Maintaining an accurate list of asset and IP inventory
• Defining a risk-driven taxonomy to manage configuration items (CI) and prioritize protection efforts
• Developing robust CI classification aligned to an understanding of mission-critical systems
• Reducing the risk of unauthorized or unsecure assets from negatively impacting the environment
• Improving breach response and vulnerability remediation efforts through a focus on high-value assets

The hybrid work environment comes with multiple employee-owned devices and disparate collaboration technologies. This has increased the importance of effectively managing myriad  devices not typically seen within the four walls of a traditional corporate office. Defining an approach to device management that factors in the modern workplace is an evolving challenge as corporate technologies struggle to keep pace with business innovation. Effectively deploying and managing endpoint technologies are critical activities to securing the access edge. Distilling down the abundance of information into meaningful insights allows an organization to secure its technology landscape more effectively.

RSM’s endpoint specialists help organizations effectively deploy and maintain endpoint protection, detection and response technologies as well as develop more impactful insights from the heightened visibility at the perimeter. Our team will help you with:

• Deploying endpoint and device management technologies to corporate- and employee-owned devices
• Defining relevant use cases and implementing enhanced tuning techniques
• Incorporating machine learning and automation within the threat detection and response capabilities
• Reducing the reliance on traditional perimeter security and increasing your overall security posture
• Operating an identity-aware environment for users and devices

The ongoing introduction of new platforms to your technology landscape brings with it additional attack vectors and risks to manage. As well, increased scrutiny by regulatory and standards bodies around the secure deployment of technologies in an organization’s environment necessitates the need for strong secure configuration management. An organization’s ability to continuously monitor compliance with secure configuration baselines, recognize deviations timing and respond quickly with the appropriate mitigation is a necessity.

RSM’s security engineers help organizations define secure configuration baselines that help achieve regulatory compliance obligations through security. Our team will deploy configuration management tools to assist with the ongoing maintenance and monitoring and will work with you on:

• Proactively implementing security controls and enhancements
• Establishing secure device configuration baselines
• Automating the secure configuration of devices and the actions required to continuously monitor for baseline deviations, and then taking appropriate corrective actions
• Reducing human error and improving overall time and accuracy by automating secure configuration management across your platforms
• Managing ongoing compliance obligations and quickly identifying deviations

Cloud adoption is rapidly accelerating the need for organizations to operate with a “shift-lift” mentality. Disjointed development processes allow for introduction of vulnerabilities at various steps within the development cycle. Far too often security is a costly and ineffective afterthought. Including the relevant security team members early in the system requirements and design phase and adopting a SecDevOps approach to development help ensure solutions are deployed in a secure and supportable manner. Ongoing involvement will help the organization adapt to design changes and address newly identified threats as they arise.

Our application security specialists help organizations at each step along the development life cycle. We have the comprehensive experience required for operating your SecDevOps function in a variety of delivery models. Our team will help you with:

• Establishing a continuous improvement cycle to obtain feedback and improve security processes, tools, and solutions
• Identifying and deploying automated security testing capabilities
• Enhancing overall quality and regulatory compliance through operating under shift-left best practices
• Conducting detailed application security architecture reviews and understanding the ability to withstand threats
• Working directly with you as the SecDevOps arm of your in-house or third-party development team

The security architecture team defines the protection mechanisms that align to an organization’s technology environment. Security engineering is tasked with identifying the right tools that meet architecture requirements, implementing those technologies and continuing to manage their ongoing administration. Implementation often requires highly specialized and costly skillsets, typically necessary only for a short period of time, which makes engaging the right partner the best decision for the organization. The transfer to ongoing operations requires valuable members of your security team to focus on low value, repetitive tasks. Making the decision to work with a managed security service provider can help realign internal resources to more value-generating activities.

RSM’s implementation specialists focus on helping clients identify the technologies that align to their architectures, deploy those protection mechanisms and help organizations transfer to successful operations. Our team will work with you on:

• Reducing overhead to implement and manage security tools
• Fine-tuning existing security tools to address organizational requirements
• Improving security orchestration, automation and response to handle simple, repetitive tasks
• Determining the right balance of in-house versus outsourced operating models
• Transferring operational responsibilities to third-party providers

The complexity of today’s technology environments and operating in a highly connected world drastically expands an organization’s attack surface. Continually monitoring your environment for new or unknown assets and insecure access points requires constant vigilance driven by automation. The business changes driving rapid digital transformation work to advance the organization but often at the expense of secure operations. Balancing the risks associated with operating in continuous state of change is difficult without the right people, processes and technology in place to successfully navigate the organization.

Our vulnerability specialists help organizations implement and operate their attack surface reduction (ASR) strategies, leveraging automation and machine learning capabilities to aid in protecting their environment. Our team will work with you on:

• Continuously executing asset discovery and classification activities
• Identifying, classifying, prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities across your landscape
• Assisting with asset and IP management activities including ongoing maintenance
• Utilizing machine learning to provide real-time protections that don’t rely only on static signatures
• Conducting asset intelligence activities to drive prioritization of corrective efforts with automated remediation capabilities deployed to reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR)
• Assisting with ASR activities related to mobile, medical devices, internal control systems (ICS) and the Internet of Things (IoT)