Open Systems
A Mission to Mitigate Cyberthreats

The rapid shift toward remote working and the increased reliance on the cloud has given cybercriminals new opportunities to access sensitive corporate information. The situation necessitates organizations undertake more proactive steps for tackling sophisticated cyber-attacks. However, this is not easily achieved for multiple reasons, most notably the global shortage of cybersecurity experts. A company that is helping businesses overcome this deficiency is Open Systems, a provider of managed networking and security services. With three decades of experience in cybersecurity, Open Systems combines cloud-delivered security solutions, deep Microsoft expertise and a unique mission-driven approach to keep clients secure.

In a recent conversation with CIO Applications, Geoff Haydon, the CEO of Open Systems, detailed how the company helps mitigate cybersecurity threats and challenges.

What are the top cybersecurity challenges facing businesses today?

Preventing cybercriminals from taking advantage of their attack surfaces – which have grown explosively in the last few years – is a major concern for companies worldwide. This growth was driven primarily by the shifting of workloads to the cloud from traditional on-premises environments, where applications and tech infrastructures resided in centralized data centers.

The work-from-anywhere trend was another factor, with the number of employees working remotely growing steadily. Things changed dramatically though with the arrival of the pandemic. Remote work suddenly became the norm, with millions of employees accessing corporate applications from home instead of the protected office environment. No wonder, during the pandemic, the world witnessed an 80 percent increase in the volume of attacks.

Truly understanding a company’s attack surface is increasingly key to effective cybersecurity. Unfortunately, most companies lack this understanding and their reliance on collections of point security products, which are inherently hard to integrate and properly configure, leaves them highly vulnerable to today’s sophisticated attacks.

Rather than buying more tools, companies need a partner who can help them understand their attack surface and provide key services that improve their security posture.

Could you shed light on the services that you offer?

Our managed services span two areas. The first is secure connectivity, which we provide with our Open Systems SASE+ secure access service edge (SASE) service.

SASE+ enables companies to safely connect their employees – regardless of location – with the data and applications they need to do their jobs.

The other area in which we assist clients is threat mitigation, using our Open Systems MDR+ managed detection and response (MDR) service to identify and remediate threats with minimal impact to business operations. This focus on containing and mitigating threats sets MDR+ apart from other MDR services. Our 30 years in cybersecurity have shown us that simply alerting customers to threats is not enough. To this end, MDR+ goes beyond traditional monitoring and detection, using a mission-driven approach to cybersecurity that drives positive outcomes.

MDR+ is a fully managed 24/7 global security operation delivered from our four Mission Control converged NOC/SOC facilities, which are strategically located around the world and staffed by our qualified DevSecOps engineers, who work directly with clients following an end-to-end workflow to ensure complete risk remediation. This includes developing a deep understanding of customers’ attack surfaces to harden them against threats.

In a nutshell, we take a holistic approach to risk mitigation—right from the assessment to prevention. This makes us more familiar with clients’ risk profiles and enables us to proactively eliminate vulnerabilities. We also have a deep understanding of Microsoft’s security solutions, which enables us to help customers unlock the value of their Microsoft security investments. This includes properly tuning and configuring Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and other Microsoft security services included in the E5 Security suite. Our expertise has even been recognized by Microsoft itself, which named us the Microsoft Security ‘MSSP Partner of the Year’ for 2022.

How will Open Systems stay a notch above the rest?

From acquiring data science engineers and leading Microsoft security experts to strengthening our partnership with Microsoft, we are hitting the key milestones in our strategic roadmap. And to accelerate this momentum and implement our vision, we brought on Tom Corn as our chief product officer. Tom has had tremendous success in bringing game changing security products and services to market for RSA Security, VMware Carbon Black and other top security companies.

What does the future hold for Open Systems?

We will continue expanding and enriching the scope of our service offerings. This includes bolstering our SASE+ service with new zero-trust network access (ZTNA) capabilities and expanding our capabilities in the area of vulnerability management. In parallel with these efforts, we are looking at the adjacent requirements of our traditional customer base for other potential opportunities. From a sales standpoint, we see plenty of opportunities for continued growth, particularly in our key markets of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the UK, Ireland, and the U.S.

We are particularly bullish about our potential to capture a significant share of the MDR market, which is fragmented and still in its nascency. There are very few companies with more than a four or five percent share of the market, while over 60 percent of the market is occupied by companies with less than one percent. So, with the market starving for leadership, we think the combination of our mission-driven approach to cybersecurity and our Microsoft experience ideally positions Open Systems to become the definitive leader in MDR.