Overview and Use Case
Quorum Cyber is a global cyber security company that helps organizations in any sector anticipate, detect, and fend off threats, breaches, and cyber-attacks. The company offers managed, advisory, and incidence response services.
Michael Fowler is the Engineering Lead at Quorum Cyber, a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Security and managed security services provider (MSSP).
The service they offer involves monitoring and managing high-priority and low-priority security-related aspects on their behalf. So, they wanted to connect their customer portal, Clarity, with their customers’ service desks.
This allows them to integrate various issue types (incidents, monitoring reports, vulnerabilities, and other custom requests), which are automatically synced to the end customer based on predefined criteria.
Challenges
Quorum Cyber’s primary integration challenge was getting their customers to keep their security tickets within their own service desk.
They needed an ITSM integration to avoid the end customer’s security team constantly having to check the MSP customer portal to stay up to date on new events and potentially critical security-related alerts.
Most customers want service desk integrations for their own service portals without having to give access to the MSSP.
Our customers wanted to work security tickets within their own service desk and didn’t particularly want to work in multiple vendor portals.
Michael Fowler, Engineering Lead at Quorum Cyber
They also wanted to exchange information faster without having to reach out to respondents personally. So when the data is transferred to the other side, the customer will receive an instant ping to notify them about updates.
For instance, when a customer creates a ticket for an urgent security incident, the Quorum Cyber team should get a notification on their service desk as soon as possible in order to initiate a rapid response game plan.
We didn’t go down the road of developing a solution ourselves purely due to resource limitation because if we developed it, we’d have to maintain it and make regular improvements.
Michael Fowler, Engineering Lead at Quorum Cyber
The team also wanted an integration option they could customize and maintain. Customers should also be able to decide to close and open tickets autonomously from their own end.
Solutions
They considered using different API integrations, but the task was too resource-heavy. So they tried different third-party integrations in the Jira Marketplace—none of them fit their integration use cases.
Some of the other integrations we looked at used a kind of a schedule-based approach…so every 10 minutes or whatnot.
Michael Fowler, Engineering Lead at Quorum Cyber
Eventually, they chose Exalate because its Integration as a Service (IaaS) offering fit right into what their customers wanted, as well as how Quorum Cyber handles sensitive data.
The main selling point was the customizability of the integration, which allowed each customer to make it work differently. Exalate also provided an out-of-the-box experience that relieved the burden of maintenance from MSPs and end users.
The Exalate managed service offering just sat nicely with us because it takes the burden of setting up, managing, and owning the infrastructure away from us and effectively does it on our behalf.
Michael Fowler, Engineering Lead at Quorum Cyber
Why Exalate?
| Michael points out that the team chose Exalate because of the following reasons: • It supports near real-time synchronization. • The engineers and support staff are absolute professionals. • The synchronized data doesn’t exist outside the environment. • The solution supports platform flexibility and autonomy (segregation). |
What made us stay with Exalate was their professionalism and willingness to work with us when we had difficult issues.
Michael Fowler, Engineering Lead at Quorum Cyber
Results
| • Increased internal sync volume to over 500 tickets per month. • Increased external syncs from a couple to around 100 per month. • 60% more customers now want service desk integration. • The Quorum Cyber team also uses Exalate for internal integrations between teams. • They now have a faster average response and resolution time. • Customers feel empowered to close low-priority tickets on their end. • Customers integrating service desks for the first time were satisfied with the experience. • They have been able to unify multiple service desks to one Jira instance while keeping the data segregated. |
Future
Based on their experience working with Exalate, Michael believes that Quorum Cyber can further use Exalate to collaborate with customers.
Going forward, Michael is confident that the company will roll out the Exalate integration solution to more of their customers.
