The tetractys, or how I started something big and want you to be part of it

This is an important year for me personally, and for the Milton family. Since starting Milton Security in 2007 I have always tried to make every new hire, and every new customer, a part of the Milton Family. Being part of a family is very different than using a product or service from other companies. We want to bring you into our family, adopt you, protect you and take care of you. We treat your problems as our own, we want you to succeed and flourish. We have always gone above and beyond for our family. In the past 10 years many other firms have come and gone. There may be fad products with lots of blinky lights (think of the machine that goes ping) but real adversaries are out there, and they come in all forms. From the disgruntled employee or applicant, to a nation state who would love to have your information for nefarious reasons.

Those adversaries will never go away, and they will always be trying to gain an advantage over your cybers. There is a constant risk vs reward struggle happening, for both sides. How much risk are you willing to take as a defender of systems. Should you spend your capital budget on new blinky products that the board of directors thinks will solve perceived problems, or should you follow your gut and use those funds to build up knowledge, monitoring, mitigation, tools, and training for your team?

If nothing else, the past 10 years has proven to me that Network Access Control (NAC) done right can be difficult if not planned and maintained properly. What is the root cause of this? Resources. Security is never answered solely with a product that you plug in and leave running. Adversaries change their tactics, your NAC appliance needs to know about it. Your network changes, your NAC appliance needs to know about that as well. You want to find the silent attacks, that means you need to be doing more than just plugging something in. You need to think about:

• How good is your endpoint health and security.
• How good is your overall network security.
• Do you have the right amount of staff to monitor and detect issues 24×7.
• If something occurs at 3am, will your systems and processes find it.
• Do you have the in-house expertise to do incident response and determine root cause.

Last year around July we decided we wanted to do more, to find more Milton Family members. We knew that NAC was our core, something we had been doing for 10 years together. We had this great team built out, in a new building of our own, with a new security operations center. Thinking along these terms, last month we introduced a better way of deploying NAC, as a service. In addition to doing NAC As A Service, we added an option to monitor other sources on your network (like your FW’s, HIDS, AV, IDS, etc). This brings us closer, making you part of our family. By doing this we are your eyes and ears. We are the ones watching at 3am, correlating information from Milton EdgeWalls, FireWalls, IDS and AV to find the silent attackers in real time on your network. In addition we are the ones that maintain the Milton EdgeWalls for you (and you don’t pay for the hardware). In effect we have we opened up our Security Operations Center for our Milton family to use.

Starting out as a products company we had to learn how to offer this level of service while maintaining our goal of making security affordable for every size organization. This was a big commitment we established 10 years ago, and we want it to be true for the next 10. After many meetings, both internal and external with our current customers, we came up with what we consider a paradigm shift in buying cyber security services. We all came to the realization that many of our customers are already used to what we call the Amazon “AWS” pricing model. Amazon breaks down their pricing on AWS to a per hour unit, so you can truly understand how much you are spending per hour, per day, per year. So we came up with a model that has for just $0.35 per hour(per source), we can monitor, detect and respond to threats on your network, 24 hour per day, 7 day a week.

There is always more than one way of accomplishing security, and as part of our Milton Family we will help you look at the problem from all angles. Over the course of the next few weeks leading up to our 10th anniversary in June, we will have guest bloggers from all over the industry. Almost all of the guest bloggers are in the Infosec industry, all are friends of Milton, even our competitors. We all have different approaches to common problems, it’s about working together to solve those common problems.