“Increasingly businesses, especially large enterprises, want to know how we are handling their data,” Timms says. “As we move more and more into the energy solutions space, where we are gathering large amounts of data about how they are using their power, businesses are concerned with what we are doing to secure that.”
However, Timms says an investigation of ERM’s existing security architecture while robust, found room for improvement.
“We were using the traditional ‘rely on your firewall’ approach,” Timms says. “We had antivirus running on the endpoints, and we thought we were covered. However, this approach represents the bare basics, and given the increasing sophistication of threats, we saw a requirement to increase the maturity of our systems and our approach.
“We could see the benefit of increasing our visibility into our environment and of going with a new solution that gave us the ability to see what was going on at the network layer.”
Timms describes ERM’s culture as entrepreneurial and lean. The company operates with only 330 staff, and just a handful of staff managing IT operations. That meant that the chosen cyber defence solution would need to be intuitive, cater to a small team of experts, and deliver for IT operations in both Australia and the US.
Read the Cyber Threat Response magazine to see how cyber criminals are exploiting the breaches
