Cosentry Takes Managed Security Services Beyond Firewall

Managed services provider Cosentry has introduced new managed security services and services that help with customers' compliance requirements.

The company said the new managed security services go beyond typical firewall monitoring. While it has done antivirus and firewall in the past, it now offers things like log inspection, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing. It can secure whatever remains on-prem, meaning customers can fully outsource security and compliance needs to the provider instead of hiring in-house specialists.

Cosentry has a substantial data center footprint in the Midwest, which it expanded further this year with two acquisitions. The company entered the Saint Louis market with acquisition of local provider Xiolink in January and in October expanded into Milwaukee by acquiring a company called Red Anvil.

“Organizations are challenged in keeping up with skill sets that support the entire IT,” said Cosentry CEO Brad Hokamp. “It becomes very difficult to acquire the talent to maintain the budget to support all of those capabilities across IT. One of our greatest advantages we have is in acquiring that talent and spreading that talent across multiple customers. We’re able to invest in software, hardware, partnerships, but also in the people.”

It is hard for companies to maintain a constant security expertise, as bad guys are constantly improving their technique, said Hokamp. “We give them access to the same protection as the big guys,” he said, meaning large companies.

An integrated Security Operations Center (SOC) provides services like patch management, 24x7 log monitoring and alerts. The new managed services join a suite of cloud-based compliance services that help industry and regulatory compliance in the move to cloud, for mandates such as HIPAA for healthcare, PCI for credit card data, SSAE16, NIST, and FISCAM.

Cosentry said it is seeing significant demand in the healthcare market in particular. The healthcare industry is moving to digital as a whole, with many smaller practices still looking to digitize. Significant fines get given out for those not maintaining HIPAA compliance to protect patient records.

High-profile attacks are raising customer awareness, and it’s a big reputation issue, let alone the financial implications, according to Hokamp.

“What the industry has seen is a requirement of corporate IT, to provide more than just network firewall management or anti-virus,” said Craig Hurley, Cosentry vice president of product management. “Security is one of the primary concerns in terms of leveraging the cloud – the breaches that have occurred in the enterprise space have taken place not in the cloud, but customer prem. Our customers are requiring help in terms of providing advanced services. A firewall is not good enough.”