About SENTINEL
Mandate to follow regulatory and data protection laws
In the last decade SMEs have been massively hit by sophisticated cyber-attacks, leading to substantial financial losses. According to Accenture, 43% percent of cyberattacks are aimed at small businesses, but only 14% are prepared to defend themselves, leading to losses of $200,000 on average . Organizations are continuously looking for advanced security solutions to combat such disruptive attacks; they are required to meet mandatory security standards, failing which they must pay hefty fines to governments. Data and privacy breaches cause massive data loss to organizations and hamper their brand image. The various regulatory standards include many more than the EU’s GDPR. For example, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), HIPAA, FISMA, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), EU Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), and the Homeland Security Act, to name just a few.
High entry point for SMEs to obtain enterprise-grade security and personal data protection
Providers of cloud services such as online CRM or e-Commerce suites often advertise security to customers in a set-and-forget manner, to deliver offerings quickly and efficiently. This type of security some of the time suffices for SMEs but when it doesn’t, great data and privacy breaches happen, exposing larger and smaller enterprises alike. To defend themselves, SMEs/MEs have the option of adopting stronger security and privacy both in their cloud apps and on on-premise infrastructure and software. However, SMEs only rarely opt to do so, viewing the price point, commitment of resources and involved learning curve as constraining factors. Premium enterprise security solutions, which usually come at high recurring subscription costs, feature comprehensive, in-depth protection from threats and data breaches. On the other end of the spectrum, existing free security options for SMEs provide rudimentary protection at the endpoint level but leave what matters most for customers, sensitive personal data residing in web apps and other infrastructures, exposed.
As adoption in cloud-based security continues to rise, intelligence-as-a-service is seen as key in lowering the entry point for SMEs and making enterprise-grade security and compliance accessible
SMEs are continuously focusing on streamlining their business models for achieving business efficiency. The SMEs across verticals do not have stringent security measures for safeguarding their data, networks, endpoints, and applications, thus becoming easy prey for cyber attackers. Smaller enterprises still do not possess advanced cybersecurity solutions to cope with an evolving threats landscape. Sophisticated cyberattacks can bypass traditional security systems easily. Hence, SMEs need to shift from conventional cybersecurity solutions to cloud-based cybersecurity solutions for securing their email, web and mobile applications, and network infrastructure throughout the development, production, and implementation phases. As SMEs shift their focus to cloud solutions, they face an intimidating range of options while in-house expertise and available financial resources are scarce. The need is apparent, therefore, to simplify security technology procurement removing expensive consulting and middlemen from the process and offer SMEs machine learning-backed intelligence as a tool to assist on which solutions to adopt, and which policy to draft and how to integrate it all into a cost effective holistic and robust framework to safeguard privacy and personal data.
Rise in IT infrastructure complexity. Household names in security currently dominating the market
With rapidly changing business processes, organizations, including SMEs/MEs’ IT infrastructure is also becoming more agile. Companies are facing challenges in mitigating risks, and in monitoring and troubleshooting their IT infrastructure. The evolving threat landscape poses a tough challenge to SMEs/MEs which, as already mentioned, have limited resources to dedicate to the cause. In today’s complex Cloud infrastructure, there exist multiple endpoints, through which end users access organizational data, including sensitive customer and other personal data. Business applications have several accounts, regulations, and other diverse processes that make it difficult for cloud-based security solutions to maintain efficiency, security, and compliance. Today, this infrastructure is being challenged by cyber threats, such as viruses, trojans, phishing attacks, malware, APTs, and sophisticated attacks such as zero-day threats. Bridging the gap between securing traditional on-premises IT infrastructure and web and mobile apps in the Cloud, including compatibility between providers, is expected to be the major challenge for security-as-a-service vendors, especially in a landscape almost exclusively dominated by the seven biggest players in the market