The Challenge
When complex application controls made it difficult for a leading Australian Managed Service Provider to maintain Essential Eight compliance, they turned to Crayon for guidance.
Slow and complex application control technologies frustrated both administrators and users, often resulting in application control being scaled back or completely removed from the customers environment.
This impacted customer trust and satisfaction, increased their vulnerability to ransomware, and put the MSP’s reputation and customer relationships at risk.
We endorse and recommend the Essential Eight to all of our customers, but the lack of an effective application control solution limited how many new customers and projects we could take on at one time.
MSP CTO
Needs Identification
Reduce admin burden
Traditional options such as Microsoft WDAC, AppLocker and other third-party solutions did not collect and present logs in an easily understood way.
The MSP sought simple, faster means to discover, centralise, and deduplicate execution data for more effective allowlist policy management.
Minimise user disruption
It was a constant issue to ensure essential files and applications for users, operating systems, and administrative tools were trusted with secure rules.
Even after refining and enforcing policies, the struggle to promptly update them or grant temporary exceptions created disruption for users and business operations.
Improve competitiveness
A new solution was needed to help the MSP take on more projects and support a larger number of customers on their Essential Eight compliance journey.
The Solution.
Crayon recommended the Airlock Digital cloud platform to streamline application control management, mitigate risk for customers, and lower the Essential Eight compliance hurdles – all with less workload for the MSPs team.
Enhanced ransomware protection for customers
Streamlined policy management and reduced workloads,
Minimal disruption to users and business operations
Deliver Level 3 Essential Eight Application Control Maturity
Solution Results
A 30-day Proof of Concept (POC) confirmed Airlock Digital’s Cloud Solution would overcome these challenges, whilst presenting the MSP with new opportunities to productise application control services.
Today, Airlock Digital’s allowlisting framework enables the MSP team to easily define what files were trusted with publisher, hash, path, and process-based trust mechanisms.
Access to real time execution data provides rapid policy management with minimal business disruption.
Explicit blocklisting is implemented with custom or pre-defined block rules to further harden endpoints, whilst the ability to temporarily exclude devices from allowlisting ensures optimal business continuity.
Best of all, the management of multiple tenants on one platform control delivery costs and has resulted in the rollout of a competively priced application control-as-a-service offering.
Airlocks’ flexible licensing model allows us to easily promote our services and greatly reduce the time to value with Airlocks’ quick set up and deployment.
MSP CTO
Ready for growth in the security domain?
Learn more about Airlock Digital, and how we can help you build your security practice by leveraging our unique through-partner services.
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