As Digital Transformation Continues in the Enterprise Cybersecurity World, One Company Reaches for the Cloud to Supercharge Analyst Productivity

As Digital Transformation Continues in the Enterprise Cybersecurity World, One Company Reaches for the Cloud to Supercharge Analyst Productivity

By Arti Loftus

It’s no secret that managing security within enterprises, organizations, and small and medium businesses have become exponentially more complex as more applications and services enter “the mix” in the brave new world of IT-based primarily on cloud and XaaS architectures.

Take, for example, a few stunning cloud adoption statistics for 2020:

  • The global public cloud service market is projected to reach $266 billion in 2020 (Source: Gartner)
  • Also, according to Gartner, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will be the fastest-growing segment of the market with 24% predicted growth, expected to reach $50 billion by the end of this year, up from $31 billion in 2018.
  • Gartner also expects that by 2022, 90% of enterprises who purchase public cloud IaaS will do so from an integrated IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
  • 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020.
  • Organizations leverage almost five different cloud platforms on average.

With all the natural benefits of moving to the cloud, especially given the grown variety of services and applications, today's enterprise IT teams are struggling to secure everything effectively and efficiently. With thousands of applications in use and new threats emerging daily, large organizations face a monumental task. Compounding matters is the fact that many IT security professionals say their employers aren't investing enough in application security relative to other cybersecurity efforts.

With the increasing number of systems to secure, and, according to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million or $148 per record stolen, more attention is being paid to “security across the board,” including data center applications, desktop applications, cloud applications, mobile applications, and web applications. 

Stellar Cyber has built a company around simplifying the process of securing infrastructure, applications, cloud services, and devices with a disruptive platform called Starlight. It is the world’s first open detection/response (Open-XDR) platform, according to the company, and connects the dots throughout the entire security infrastructure enabling automatic responses to attacks whenever and wherever they occur.

Starlight integrates dozens of security applications from an App Store and presents results in an intuitive dashboard to “supercharge analyst productivity.”

We caught up with Steve Garrison, Chief Marketing Officer of Stellar, at this year’s ITEXPO to learn more about what they’re focused on in 2020.

What is your theme for this new year and new decade?

Platforms, not silos! MSSPs are becoming a new channel for vendors and, more importantly, a means for mid-sized and smaller enterprises to obtain security services. Traditional box selling no longer brings margin ... hardware has been commoditized.

What’s different about your approach?

Stellar Cyber delivers a turnkey, automated, consolidated Security Operations (SOC) platform for MSSPs with a multi-tenant architecture designed to drive high-margin business. We make it very easy for MSSPs to serve their customers with a high degree of productivity, which leads to greater profitability.

What customer challenges do those offerings address, and how?

First, we reduce capital costs and storage costs at least 5x or 80%, compared to traditional SIEMs, which store a lot of data that is not needed.

Second, we dramatically improve team productivity, turning activities that used to take days into minutes, making teams, on average, 20X more productive. For example, our system sends ten important alerts versus hundreds which analysts have to sift through manually.

Third, we provide a very intuitive UX on a single pane of glass, which aggregates security tools to a single, unified platform.

Fourth, we make it easier for MSSPs to hire and train; you don’t need to have an engineering degree or command the salary of an engineer to use the system, given our intuitive GUI and the automation build in, which reduces the need for very experienced analysts

Fifth, the training process shrinks from weeks to days.

What is your vision for this year – where do you see your market growth coming from and where do you see the market itself going?

We see MSSPs leading managed detection and response services, which is why this market is expected to grow to $17B in annual revenue by 2021.  (According to 451 research, managed security services revenue is expected to exceed $17B by 2021).

Managed Security Services entail the outsourcing of some, or all IT security functions to a service provider that monitors and manages the environment from an offsite location. Included in our definition are providers that take over management of on-premises security technology belonging to the customer, or that deploy security technology to the customer's premises and manage it from off-site.

But how can you compete with limited talent? Stellar Cyber leverages automation, so our customers have a virtual assistant in the platform, which gives them a competitive advantage both technology-wise and in terms of operational margin.

Enterprises are challenged to keep up with ever-increasing security challenges, which creates a market demand for MSSPs, and we provide them with an incredible platform for productivity and positive business outcomes. Businesses are continuing to outsource due to the complexity of the security space, availability of security expertise and cost to buy and maintain infrastructure.

MSSPs give enterprises another path to having maximum protection of their applications and data when they provide flexible options, a subscription model if they chose, and control of operating costs and an overall improvement in “TCO.”

Our machine learning and AI technology ensure that the MSP’s security analysts don’t become overwhelmed with false positives and have built-in multitenancy so MSPs can easily onboard and manage hundreds of customer accounts. Our Open-XDR platform can extract data from existing firewalls, SIEM, and other security systems to enhance its detection and automated response capabilities and preserve existing infrastructure investments.

In addition to your “app store” for analysts, built into the platform, what add-ons are available?

Along with our built-in response capabilities, Starlight also has orchestration plugins for SIEMs as well as SOAR tools such as Phantom Cyber and Demisto. The SIEM plugin streams events and the SOAR plugins allow Starlight’s detections to automatically trigger playbooks that reside in orchestration products to perform a variety of instructions that could include executing scripts or integrating with other tools in the environment.


Arti Loftus is an experienced Information Technology specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the research, writing, and editing industry with many published articles under her belt.

Edited by Maurice Nagle
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