How Nviso, a Cybersecurity MSP Uses Deep Ticket Integration as a Competitive Advantage
NVISO is a global cybersecurity company based in Brussels, Belgium with offices around Europe. It helps its customers prevent, detect, and respond to security issues in an optimal way to achieve, what they call, a “stronger security posture”.
NVISO is a Managed Services Security Provider who also provides professional services ranging from security design and assessment to incident response and threat hunting.
They have a 24/7 incident hotline in place meaning that the customers can get emergency support whenever there is a breach or a security issue.
NVISO has also designed a third-party risk assurance framework that includes the initial evaluation of the risk profile of the supplier. It is used to tailor the depth of the assessment and can also optimize the cost of each assessment.
When it comes to integrating multiple systems, especially in the context of cross-company integration, security becomes a highly critical issue for a lot of users. As an experienced expert in the field, NVISO aims to address these security risks by ensuring that communication between any two parties is safeguarded.
Alexander Sinno, Head of Managed Security Services and specialist in building cybersecurity fusion centers at NVISO, tells us more about his experience with Exalate and why it has been a good fit for their set of tools in the cybersecurity domain.
Challenges
- Communication gap between the MSP and customers
- Security risk of single-point contact
- Ticket-based security incident management
- Frustration of adding another ITSM tool
Before adopting an integration solution, the typical workflow for NVISO was to raise a security incident to a customer mainly through tickets and emails. Which actually came at the risk of being reliant on a single point of contact instead.
It was much more efficient for NVISO to have multiple points of contact to ensure that somebody would pick up that ticket, add it as a task, and start the communication. That could allow for immediate ticket creation in their customer’s ITSM ticketing tool so they could easily communicate back to their analysts by raising a comment in their own tool.
The analyst would then respond back to the customer by placing different types of attachments for the customers to see. Since the customer could also raise attachments back to NVISO, the process would be a lot less confusing for both sides.
With the fast-paced growth in the work management systems, it’s crucial to have an integration solution in place. Everybody has their own solution and workflow and they wouldn’t want just to leave their environment and work in a new one.
Alexander explains that some organizations already have 2-3 ITSM tools, adding yet another tool was an option for them since it can quickly get frustrating and messy as they’d need to learn how the new tool works.
That’s why it made more sense to stick to their own tool and integrate it with the other one(s).
Solutions
- Building an in-house integration solution
- Adopting an integration solution
So NVISO started the integration journey by building its own solution. The solution actually worked but the maintenance was quite expensive and it made more sense to work with a partner like Exalate who had a lot of experience in the field and was overall more cost-effective.
The reason why NVISO started using Exalate in the first place was to give their customers the autonomy of staying their own tool while integrating with NVISO’s Jira. Because their customers wanted to give NVISO access to their essential data without going back and forth via email. And that could simply be implemented by an integration solution like Exalate.
ALEXANDER SINNO
NVISO
It was highly crucial for NVISO to make sure data was handled properly due to GDPR and data residency purposes, especially since they dealt with customers’ security incidents.
ALEXANDER SINNO
NVISO
Results
- Autonomy (working from the comfort of a familiar environment)
- Cost effectiveness
- Workflow optimization
- Easy network expansion
NVISO works with customers who use multiple task management systems like Jira and ServiceNow. They manage their security incidents and take care of their cybersecurity in general. And as Exalate grows and supports more platforms, NVISO will build new service templates to ensure that each customer’s integration looks exactly the same depending on the tool they use.
A lot of MSPs face some difficulty when it comes to ITSM syncing. But for NVISO, Exalate soon became a differentiating value since they were able to approach their customers using their own ITSM through Exalate.
ALEXANDER SINNO
NVISO
Now everything could be handled in a clear two-way communication between the MSSP and the customers. That has specifically made the whole process a lot smoother for their customers.
Since customers don’t need to switch or log in to another tool and can have NVISO take care of their incidents via Exalate, they are actually interested in implementing such an integration.
ALEXANDER SINNO
NVISO
Take a look at what goes under the hood in regards to architecture, security and deployment options for Exalate
Measurable Benefits
Being able to implement ITSM integration is actually a competitive advantage for NVISO as they can have a closer relationship with their customers. It’s like they’re just another person in their ticketing tool, having a conversation.
On the other hand from an operational perspective, it’s quite efficient for the analysts to be able to talk directly to multiple people (or a team of people) who are in one ticket queue in their ITSM syncing tools, their process, or their workflow that they are used to.
ALEXANDER SINNO, NVISO
Typical Use Case
One of the most typical use cases NVISO implements with Exalate for all its customers (as an MSSP) is to automatically generate tickets for them so then they can easily sync comments, attachments, statuses, etc between platforms.
They have actually made a template out of this (platform-specific) and they keep this template consistent so they can use it for the new customers who join their Exalate ecosystem.
NVISO actually positions itself as the central hub (working in Jira) and using Exalate, connects to its customers (who are mostly on ServiceNow).
A Netword of Connected Companies
ALEXANDER SINNO
NVISO
Maximize your potential by streamlining your workflow with Exalate. It’s flexible enough for any synchronization use case.