Keeping Your Remote Workforce Secure With Security-as-a-Service From Braintrace

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Greg Spicer

We recently had a chance to speak with Greg Spicer, the CRO at Braintrace, to discuss the firm's newest service offering, which they introducted in response to the dramatic shift in the business environment, as IT departments everywhere suddenly found themselves scrambling to support a remote workforce that mushroomed overnight.  

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PinHawk:  Who is this Security-as-a-Service designed for and what problem are you solving for your clients?

Greg Spicer:   We developed this new service to address the needs of law firms and law departments of all sizes, as they found themselves struggling to adapt to a new operating environment that basically emerged overnight.  All of a sudden almost all of their employees were working from home and many of our clients found themselves under-resourced in order to provide truly secure connectivity to support them.  There were only so many firm laptops to go around and too many folks working remotely were connecting from their personal home devices that didn’t provide a safe VPN connection.

We monitor network traffic for many of our clients and right away we could see how vulnerable they had become.  To contend with all the remote traffic, many IT departments simply responded by exposing RDP over the internet.  In fact, over the last month we saw an increase of 7,000% in port 3389 sessions for firms going out over the internet.  A few other IT departments seem to have opted instead to expose RDP to non-standard ports in the mistaken belief that this would somehow keep them safer.  Both these methods are highly vulnerable to attack.

Our new Security-as-a-Service offering solves this problem. We can provide data security for all firm employees who need remote access, no matter what sort of home device they are working on.

PinHawk:  What do clients receive through your Security-as-a-Service offering?    

Greg Spicer:  We protect all remote access to the firm’s network that’s not otherwise connecting through a VPN.  We describe this as an Enterprise Firewall-as-a-Service.  Traffic from an employee’s home network streams through Briantrace’s enterprise-grade UTM firewalls.  This allows us to ensure protection against the latest threat actors by establishing all rules for firewall egress and ingress.  We block, filter and monitor for risky traffic and events and our security operation center analyzes all detected alerts.  Instead of exposing your RDP to bad actors, your remote workforce will have the benefit of a security blanket provided by Braintrace’s state-of-the-art control and monitoring services. 

There are a number of other key features included as part of the new offering:

• Endpoint protection for the Home.  In addition to secure remote access, our service also provides an endpoint detection tool, which leverages next-generation AI-powered threat detection.
• Vulnerability Scanning.  Braintrace will perform internal, unauthenticated and comprehensive vulnerability scans within the home network environment for your remote staff, in order to validate that updates and patches are current and not susceptible to attack.  
• SIEM-as-a-Service.  We also provide managed SIEM and SIEM-as-a-Serivce for our clients.  We deploy IBM’s QRadar to monitor your log data and perform real-time analysis in order to provide round-the-clock protection against cyber-attacks.
• Managed Network Traffic Analysis (MNTA).  The team in our Security Operations Center monitors, investigates and triages all alerts triggered by Braintrace’s NTA tool.  Utilizing advanced analytic tools and rule-based alerts, our team proactively tracks and hunts threats, event-triggered PCAP data, encrypted payload fingerprints, and anomalous threats to validate in real-time all incidents and reports.

PinHawk:  How does Braintrace’s Security-as-a-Service offering compare in cost to other options that might be available to IT departments looking to provide a secure connection for the remote workforce?

Greg Spicer:   From the outset we had two business objectives as we put together this new offering.  We realized it had to be provided on an SaaS basis – an outsourced solution that clients could implement immediately.  And we wanted it to be highly cost-effective and much cheaper than the alternative of providing firm hardware or VPNs for everyone working remotely. 

The bottom line is that by leveraging Braintrace’s state of the art platform, we can provide our clients with real peace of mind in a highly efficient, money-saving way