Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can gain affordable access to cyberthreat intelligence networks and security operations centres by using hosted cloud platforms and security services to receive information specific to their industry and risk profile, says cybersecurity multinational Kaspersky Lab South Africa MD Riaan Badenhorst.

The two main factors that typically prevent SMEs from deploying or using advanced threat intelligence are the high cost of bespoke threat intelligence and a lack of in-house skills to leverage threat information.

“Typical SMEs – comprising about 150 people – would not necessarily have a cybersecurity specialist in the team and information technology (IT) staff might not know how to respond holistically to threat intelligence warnings.”

SMEs can subscribe to advanced threat-protection reporting services and get access to aggregated threat intelligence feeds that are then segmented for various industries and subscribers’ risk profiles. Kaspersky Lab recently made its advanced persistent threat reporting service available to subscribers.

However, skills to determine risk profile and respond actively when threats appear are barriers to the effective use of threat intelligence feeds. The pace of change of cyberthreats often requires high-level skills to keep abreast of hourly changes in threats worldwide.

Shared cybersecurity platforms can make high-level security services, typically connected to high-level security operations centres, more affordable for SMEs, but are not yet common in South Africa.

Kaspersky Lab is in discussions with large local Internet and cloud service providers to deploy such cloud-based security services, specifically the Kaspersky Lab systems, for SME clients, and then use various analytics systems to send company-specific intelligence to companies.

“Intelligence reports only, even though they are crucial and useful, are not always the best way for SMEs to protect themselves. Placing IT processes in a hosted environment, such as cloud services, can provide seamless and better protection as a managed service in an inherently secure environment,” says Badenhorst.

The ability to manage clients’ threat protection system from the cloud becomes necessary to provide high-level protection at a price that SMEs can afford. The monthly pay-as-you-use model commonly used for various cloud services is also very useful for SMEs to control costs and even access higher-level security services for brief periods.

Many cybersecurity services already provide various automated cybersecurity capabilities, such as identifying older-version software and firmware, and notifying SMEs that these older versions must be updated to close a vulnerability. Managing such vulnerabilities from a cloud platform means this can be done simultaneously for many clients, improving response times and lowering costs.