Small-medium businesses (SMBs) often struggle to create effective cyber security solutions. On Episode 40 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast, we spoke to Amanda Berlin, the Director of Incident Detection Engineering at Blumira, about her company’s innovative solutions that are specifically tailored to SMBs. Amanda is also the Author of The Defensive Security Handbook, Co-Host of the Breaking Down Security Podcast, and CEO of Mental Health Hackers, giving her a wealth of insights into the space. Read on for her insights on cyber security solutions for SMBs. 

What challenges do SMBs face from a security perspective, and how do their challenges differ from larger enterprises?

Enterprises usually are bigger targets. When they get a breach, they have a budget, people, software and all the implementations necessary to deal with it. SMBs, even if they are breached, don’t necessarily get that afterwards. They have to make do with the software that they have at their disposal, and usually not many people. There are multiple roles that these people play. SMBs don’t have a CISO or anybody in charge of cyber security. Many times, they won’t even have a security team. There are just one or two tech people who are fixing everything from printers to security breaches. 

How have you seen the awareness of SMB business security changing over your time in the space at Blumira? 

When we started Blumira, people said it’s not changing that fast. They thought we were crazy for creating a product for SMBs because it’s a hard market to reach. A lot of them don’t realise that they need the security that they do, or they think they can’t afford it. There are all of these software platforms that are built for enterprises that SMBs are trying to implement themselves, but they can’t maintain it forever. We saw the constant struggle for SMBs to implement anything that was designed for a larger scale, and having worked at SMBs for pretty much my entire life, it’s a problem that I’m really passionate about fixing. I tried to implement a SIM once too, and it was terrible.

How does Blumira fit into the SIM and XDR market, and what’s your approach to securing those businesses? 

When we started Blumira, our leadership talked about making a sim for SMBs that you could implement in under a week. I thought they were insane because our onboarding process was at least six months in the companies I’d worked in before. You had to set up the servers and ingest the logs, which was a two-month-long process. You had to talk to them about all their use cases and work with the customer one-on-one. Coming from that, I was like, ‘There’s absolutely no way we can create a product that you can do in three months.’ But then we did it. And that’s why I’m still here because I never thought it would happen. We’ve had customers roll out their entire infrastructure in less than an hour. Just from the technology perspective, that’s a really difficult thing to accomplish. 

When you work in a SOC, there are a lot of level-one analysts who are fresh out of college or really new to the space and are doing a lot of repetitive work and missing things. Because they’re seeing 10,000 alerts a day, they have to make sure they don’t miss escalating something that could be worse. We’re leaving that to the most junior people in the company. Instead, we automated everything that we possibly could in a SOC and the platform. Anytime we have a network scan done, we would get an email from every single UPS device underneath somebody’s desk. That’s how a lot of SIMs are, but we just automated all of that because you shouldn’t have to deal with 10,000 alerts every time you do a scan.

To hear more from Amanda, tune in to Episode 40 of The Cyber Security Matters Podcast here. 

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