TB Consulting

TB Consulting creates measurable value for clients with Tenable One

“You mean I’ve been stressing about our risk stance for months and now it’s all right here in this report?” That was the reaction when TB Consulting provided a client’s CIO with a holistic view of all assets, vulnerabilities and cyber risk across the company’s attack surface.

With cybersecurity teams under siege and often overwhelmed by a tidal wave of potential threats, TB Consulting (TBC) brings enterprise-level solutions to its clients, helping them identify vulnerabilities and manage risk across an increasingly complex threat landscape.

An important part of TBC’s workflow and xTDR, its expanded threat detection and response solution, Tenable One provides an unprecedented level of visibility across the modern attack surface. TBC engineers help guide their clients’ efforts to prevent likely attacks through predictive and prioritized exposure management and accurately communicate cyber risk to support optimal business performance. TBC has documented as much as a 10-fold increase in the number of assets tracked, ensuring that engineers and clients no longer have to juggle spreadsheets while still asking, “What am I missing?”.

“Organizations moving to hybrid and multi-cloud environments often struggle to integrate and consolidate costly point tools and improve visibility and control across an ever-growing attack surface. As an MSSP, our clients look to TBC to help ease these pains,” says Marcos Saiz, CISO of TBC. “Tenable One is a single consolidation point for managing exposure, including vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and privileges, that is cost effective and synergistic with our business model.”

TBC has also improved its own efficiency, reducing by 75% the time spent on manual tasks and enabling its skilled engineering team to spend more time helping clients focus on critical remediation tasks.

TBC reduces data gathering by 75%

Managing risk means knowing what you have. Time-consuming manual processes were the norm for TBC engineers working to establish a concise view of each client’s attack surface. “How do we get visibility into the cloud?” “What about accounting for all of the endpoints?” What’s most vulnerable?” “How do we tie everything back to risk?”

These questions and more had to be answered before engineers could commence analysis and remediation efforts. Three quarters of every hour were spent on administrative tasks like writing scripts, dealing with 500-column spreadsheets and culling through volumes of raw data.

That’s when the team implemented the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, which combines the broadest vulnerability coverage spanning IT assets, cloud resources, containers, web apps and identity systems, and adds comprehensive analytics to prioritize actions and communicate cyber risk.

From cloud visibility to endpoints and everything in between, no matter the location, TBC counts on Tenable One to quickly identify all assets and vulnerabilities across each client’s attack surface, prioritize mitigation, and view the results in a unified view. For one TBC client, this resulted in a 10x increase in tracked assets – from 3,000 to 30,000. Unhindered by the manual processes and spreadsheets of the past, TBC engineers have flipped the ratio of time spent gathering data versus making decisions that matter for their clients.

“Tenable One has helped our engineers reduce the time spent on manual tasks by 75%, which allows them to focus on actual engineering work,” says Saiz. “Instead of spending hours cutting and pasting data from multiple sources, we start threat hunting in minutes to see if a vulnerability has been exploited. We can then advise our clients about whether they can relax and follow a normal patch cycle, or whether they need to put down their coffee cup and remediate immediately.”

Together, TBC and Tenable One reduce total cost of ownership for clients

TBC’s goal is to reduce the total cost of ownership for clients, freeing them up to work on other important projects for their organization.

CTO Charles Montgomery says reducing costs through smart software licensing processes, and reducing risk by knowing the risk profile so you know what can be patched versus replaced, plays an important role.

“Having a dashboard that shows us the version and patch level of each host is a time and cost saver for our engineers because it allows them to focus on critical remediation efforts,” says Montgomery. “Additionally, we’ve reduced our SQL costs by 30% because Tenable One reveals the number of licenses actually in use. This is an important cost benefit for our clients.”

Account executive Samuel Hernandez recounted how one of his manufacturing clients approached TBC because of a backlog of cyber-readiness projects promised to its Board of Directors. The security team was on a hamster wheel trying to keep up with vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across its attack surface, and its current vulnerability management tool wasn’t production ready. The client needed a tool to identify all of its assets.

“Using Tenable One we were able to gather the data and correlate it in an automated fashion. We’ve been able to help the CISO check boxes off of this list,” says Hernandez. “When you can go from an hour to just a few minutes gathering data, the efficiencies really add up. We helped deliver in three months something that he’d been trying to achieve for two years.”

Having a clear, risk-based view of the attack surface has even helped TBC reduce the number of tickets raised by its SOC. According to Montgomery, “Over a period of six months we reduced the number of tickets generated by our SOC by 82%, from around 1,700 tickets to 300. When you multiply this by the time savings generated by Tenable One, the efficiency is exponential.”

Tenable One feeds the engine of xTDR, TBC’s unique end-to-end threat detection and response solution. Using the exposure management results from Tenable One, TBC uses its data lake and AI/ML algorithms to provide additional context and even deeper understanding of each client's risk posture.

“Our xTDR solution helps organizations reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for separate licenses and reducing operational complexities. Through automation, centralized management, and improved efficiency, xTDR streamlines security operations, minimizing operational load and associated costs,” says Saiz. “My priority is to identify the backbone technologies needed for xTDR to provide the value our clients expect, and Tenable One is a key enabler.”

Tenable One also helps navigate the challenges and expense of managing multiple point tools. “Everyone is buying solutions, yet successful cyberattacks are still on the rise,” says Saiz. “Tenable One allows us to execute on the outcomes these tools were supposed to provide. Consolidating these tools under one platform ensures visibility into everything you need.”

Streamlined reporting supports senior management, board and compliance needs

Providing an accurate risk assessment to executives and boards is a critical business driver to improve investment decisions, insurability, meet regulatory and compliance requirements and drive organizational improvement.

While the threat landscape is always evolving, Saiz explained that the rapid migration to the cloud and third-party applications over the past decade has expanded the attack surface into areas that are difficult to control, further complicating how an organization quantifies cyber risk to both the board and regulatory bodies.

Tenable One provides the actionable metrics to measure, compare and communicate cyber risk to non-technical execs and operating teams. A unified view of cyber risk with clear KPIs allows executives to measure progress over time and benchmarked comparisons against industry peers and within the organization.

Organizations using Tenable One are a step ahead when it comes to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ruling requiring organizations to disclose their cyber security process. TBC has been building to SEC Section 106 for a year, and using Tenable One has already aligned several of its publicly traded clients to the new regulations.

“The US SEC ruling is a more stringent control around making sure that organizations are acting with due diligence and care within their cyber security programs, and now they have to prove it,” says Saiz. “Tenable One does the work for you because it identifies assets, quantifies risks, and prioritizes and validates remediation efforts. This helps us accelerate time to value for our clients.”

Elaborating on the experiences with TBC’s manufacturing client, Hernandez also noted the power of a holistic view of cyber risk in bringing down the stress level for leaders trying to protect their business and customers.

“The CIO needed to know where he stood, and when presented with the unified dashboard was elated because it was just the report he needed,” says Hernandez. “Suddenly, he went from a world of overwhelming spreadsheets and always wondering what was missing to a dynamic reporting system that gave him confidence that everything was captured.”

TBC and Tenable: The magic is in the execution

Tenable’s approach to exposure management is a great fit with TBC’s services offering.

“We start with Tenable One because it provides so much enrichment and context to the data that we're seeing,” says Montgomery. “Then we can put together a true roadmap that will take our clients where they need to go.”

“As a CISO, your goal is to understand the risk and communicate with confidence that you have the information needed to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities. Tenable One reduces time to value by consolidating point solutions on a single pane of glass,” says Saiz. “The magic is in the execution, and through our partnership with Tenable we consistently minimize the security risk for our clients, enabling them to concentrate on business-building innovation rather than IT strategy and software implementations.”