OpsRamp Tackles Security from the Outside-in with ASI

“The second you say you’re a SaaS platform, people start asking questions about security,” says Viswanatha Penmetsa, Director of SaaS Operations at OpsRamp. “They want to know how we store and transfer data, what types of compliance practices we follow, how often we do vulnerability assessments. I would say security is one of the most important factors in deciding to use our services.”

Fortunately, the San Jose, CA-based provider of AI-powered Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM) services has a good answer. OpsRamp mounts an innovative, end-to-end cybersecurity strategy that includes leveraging Netenrich’s Intelligent SOC and Attack Surface Intelligence (ASI)* offerings.

“We’re doing many things to address cybersecurity, from maintaining secure code practices to conducting vulnerability assessments to securing our external attack surface with Netenrich,” says Penmetsa. “It’s impossible to validate external risk manually as the network scales, so ASI plays a critical role in letting us see the real-time impact of what’s happening from an outside-in perspective.”

Part of Netenrich’s integrated Threat & Attack Surface Intelligence suite, ASI sizes up an organization’s network the way adversaries might, identifying potential attack vectors beyond the company firewalls. ASI highlights four major areas of risk: configurations—or misconfigurations—brand exposure from URLs and domains, certificates, and vulnerabilities.

ASI complements OpsRamp’s own automation around monitoring expiring certificates and identifying open ports in cloud environments. Upon discovering potential risk, ASI alerts the right members of the OpsRamp SecOps or deployment teams to take action. Analysts can proactively monitor digital risk within the ASI portal as well.

“We have a very strong and active development team,” Penmetsa says. “So, we have to be careful about things like exposure in Github environments or misconfiguration in public cloud elements. ASI really helps in monitoring these kinds of things.”

Along with real-time alerting, OpsRamp finds the comprehensive monthly reports generated by ASI extremely useful. “The report we get every month is a very valuable addition to our day-to-day validation,” says Penmetsa. “It gives us a glimpse of everything that’s happening. The moment we get the report we try to make sure everything gets handled immediately so that, between our own automation and the ASI portal, we’re covering everything from an attack surface perspective.”

Intelligent SOC ‘Enriches internal telemetry as well’

Building on ASI, Netenrich’s Intelligent Security Operations Center (SOC) technology and expertise bring valuable depth and insight. “Our security teams work closely together,” Penmetsa says. “The Netenrich SOC team looks at alerts, removes a lot of false positives, and notifies us to address the real exceptions. They also help with monthly vulnerability reports.”

OpsRamp’s Security Operations experts interact across the provider’s development, deployment, and daily operations teams. The Netenrich SOC team contributes to some 40 percent of the overall operations workload in one way or another. Beyond fast-tracking response, having Netenrich handle  Level 1 to 2 security tasks frees OpsRamp analysts to focus on more challenging efforts like delving into high-level analytics.

“Being able to offload some of the ‘busy work’ helps my team focus more on application-level security vulnerabilities and those kind of things,” says Penmetsa.  “But for me, the real benefit is the peace of mind of knowing that everything is getting done.”

With Netenrich’s expansive, outcomes-based approach, enterprise customers derive exponential value from solutions leveraging OpsRamp and Netenrich—and gain peace of mind as well.

“The Netenrich approach fits well with our strategy of bringing security into everything early on and overcomes customers’ security concerns around leveraging a secure SaaS platform as well,” Penmetsa says. “It’s very impressive the way the whole solution is coming together.”

Learn more about Intelligent SOC

With additional functionalities to address the Dark Web, cloud, and breach and attack simulation, Intelligent SOC delivers the flexibility, expertise, and investment protection needed to scale best practices for years to come. Enterprises can get what they need when they need it to continually speed response, retain skills, and reduce run costs while improving their security posture.

Viswanatha Penmetsa shares practical security advice in an engaging video series with Brandon Hoffman, CISO at Netenrich.

Learn how we can help your organization gain greater visibility and operational efficiencies.

*Please note, Attack Surface Intelligence (ASI) is now known as Attack Surface Exposure (ASE). For more information, please contact us.