When one of the world’s leading beverage companies began their search for a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) or Managed Detection and Response (MDR) partner, they built a checklist and request for proposal (RFP) that covered all the basic functions you would expect – and then sent it out to 20 different firms, including some of the biggest names in the security services space, such as IBM, SecureWorks, The Herjavec Group, HP and others.
Among the early responses they received was one from CRITICALSTART, and that response drove them to rethink what they were looking for in a partner. That’s because CRITICALSTART was offering a set of services and capabilities that no other vendor had even mentioned, let alone could match. Specifically, they were intrigued by CRITICALSTART’s commitment to 100% transparency and the notion that they could view as much or as little of what was happening behind the scenes as they wanted – things like specific types of alerts, total number of alerts marked as good or bad, and other data points that could help them govern their business. This would afford them the ability to offload day-to-day operations and benefit from CRITICALSTART’s deep security expertise, while still retaining a sense of control and insight. No other vendor was willing or able to match that level of visibility – instead, competitors offered the more traditional “black box” model where the customer was on the other end of a less productive and less trustworthy “need to know” relationship.
Transparency to the customer was a guiding principle in the creation of CRITICALSTART’s MDR offering. In the early days, the company’s head of managed services polled former colleagues and outside security executives to get their perspectives on working with a third-party managed services vendor. The feedback was unanimous – the greatest concern they shared was “black box” technology and a lack of visibility into what was really going on behind the scenes. So CRITICALSTART built their MDR service to ensure 100% transparency to every customer, all the time.
As for the selection process, the customer narrowed the list of vendors to CRITICALSTART and SecureWorks and toured the Security Operation Centers (SOCs) for both. And in the end, the combination of a passionate and highly knowledgeable team, world-class facilities, a set of game-changing capabilities, and especially the proven commitment to 100% transparency – which none of the other vendors offered – led them to choose CRITICALSTART as their MDR partner.
