Business News sponsored by Vodacom Transformation of Work:

ESET’s services portfolio, including Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Premium Support, Deployment & Upgrade, and HealthCheck, is now available in South Africa for both Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and large corporates.

It should come as no surprise to learn that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) perceive themselves to be more susceptible to cyberattacks than their enterprise cousins.

These organisations stand to suffer data loss, face financial ramifications, or experience a drop in customer confidence and trust, due to security breaches. While SMEs grapple with budget limitations compared to larger corporations, many have not aligned their cybersecurity investments with the evolving dynamics of their operational models.

Digital transformation and the rise of cloud computing has further exacerbated this challenge, as the virtual world opens new attack vectors for bad actors and has led to a significant increase in data breaches. Adding complexity to the SME's security concerns is that cybercriminals have become increasingly sophisticated in finding ways to break into business networks, so a purely reactive approach is no longer enough.

“Early detection of threats, improved incident response, reduced risk of data breaches, enhanced security posture, and cost savings are among the many potential benefits of ESET Services that are now available in South Africa. In a fast-changing digital security landscape, access to such services is vital for organisations of all sizes,” explains Carey van Vlaanderen, CEO of ESET Southern Africa.

ESET offers a comprehensive range of services, designed to assist companies in exploiting the full potential of their ESET products. This not only ensures protection against any potential security issues but also prevents any malicious code from spreading within their networks.

“Our unified Services Portfolio makes ESET products accessible to customers without the necessary skillset or resources to operate them. Through this increased accessibility ESET is ensuring that no one gets left behind,” continues van Vlaanderen.

“One of the best preventative measures available is Managed Detection and Response (MDR), a Security-as-a-Service offering, where a third-party provider handles a company’s security operations. MDR bridges expertise gaps in SMEs by providing access to industry-leading cybersecurity professionals. Going beyond merely detecting threats, MDR is a solution where the provider actively works to remediate potential security threats.”

As a global leader in cybersecurity, ESET is expanding its security portfolio with an MDR solution tailored for SMEs. This offering not only assists SMEs in enhancing their security postures, reducing false positives, and fortifying threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities but also provides 24/7/365 expert security capabilities. By doing so, it eliminates the need for an in-house security team to monitor the threat environment continuously. Additionally, MDR enhances regulatory compliance, aiding SMEs in achieving essential cyber controls for insurability.

In addition, states van Vlaanderen, ESET has combined AI-powered automation with human expertise and comprehensive threat intelligence knowledge, to deliver a threat detection and incident response for SMEs that is unmatched in this space.

“Delivered through the renowned ESET PROTECT Platform, the new service is designed to rapidly investigate and disrupt malicious activities and thwart bad actors. At the same time, the service is tailored to meet the challenges of hybrid work environments, by conducting threat hunting, monitoring, and response. This is achieved by enforcing robust cybersecurity measures that address the SME market’s specific needs,” she notes.

Moreover, by leveraging its innovative cybersecurity technologies to collect unique data - notably from regions under attack from sophisticated cyber-criminal groups - ESET can ensure an effective threat defence.

The service even offers individual customers access to a library of predefined patterns, along with the ability to create custom rule patterns. These in turn trigger appropriate actions in response to both specific detections and suspicious behaviours, executables, and processes.

Van Vlaanderen suggests that the modern threat landscape can be summed up in one word - dynamic, adding that it is also a world where bad actors increasingly target SMEs, specifically due to their lack of expertise, capacity, or both. With this in mind, it is imperative that such businesses have access to the best and most effective security protections they can afford.

“ESET not only has a long history of cybersecurity expertise but also more than 500 000 global SME customers, meaning the company is well aware of small businesses’ need for an affordable, scalable service. ESET’s MDR solution is the answer to these needs, delivering a 24/7 MDR service that is powered by our long-lasting threat intelligence expertise, thus leaving SME clients free to focus on what they do best - running their businesses exceptionally well,” concludes van Vlaanderen.