Critical Start Launches Asset Visibility to Ensure Managed Detection and Response Has Full Signal Coverage for a More Effective Approach to Reducing Cyber Risk

PLANO, TX, January 9, 2024 – Today, Critical Start, a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) cybersecurity solutions and pioneer of Managed Cyber Risk Reduction (MCRR), announced the general availability of their Asset Visibility offering. As part of an MCRR strategy, Asset Visibility helps customers become more proactive within their security program, helping them uncover assets that need protection, validate that the expected endpoint security controls are in place and working, and identify areas of risk exposure due to gaps in security coverage.  

Businesses today face increasing challenges with managing cyber risk, maximizing current technology, and optimizing costs. Compounding these challenges, security leaders are tasked with safeguarding their organization by doing more with less. According to Critical Start’s 2023 Cyber Risk Landscape Peer Report, 90% of organizations lack the time to continuously monitor security posture and identify potential areas of control failure, hindering their ability to understand their level of risk exposure.  

Critical Start is committed to doing what’s best for its customers and helping security teams overcome these challenges. Since MDR solutions are only as good as the security signals they receive, endpoint security coverage monitoring is a must-have for organizations that prioritize risk, which is why Critical Start has taken the unique step of including Endpoint Security Coverage Gaps, a component of its new Asset Visibility offering, as standard within its MDR service at no extra charge. By revealing endpoint security coverage gaps, weaknesses in attack surfaces can be mitigated to ensure the SOC receives the expected signals for threat identification and containment. 

For customers needing enhanced asset visibility and management capabilities beyond Endpoint Security Coverage Gaps, Critical Start offers Asset Visibility as a standalone module that can be used with or without existing MDR services. Asset Visibility is one of several data sources that feed into Critical Start’s Risk-Ranked Reduction Recommendations component of our Cyber Risk Dashboard, which analyzes a customer’s security posture and risk exposure to suggest the next best action to take to reduce the most risk and empowers security leaders with data-driven insights on optimizing their security programs and getting the most value from their cybersecurity investments.  

Based on their unique cyber risk management needs, businesses can choose which offer gives them the expanded visibility and tighter control of endpoint security coverage they need to protect their organization and keep ahead of risk. 

Included as Standard with Critical Start MDR 

• Endpoint Security Coverage Gaps: Highlights the level of risk exposure to the organization due to endpoint security coverage gaps by identifying previously unknown or unmanaged assets and allows for gap mitigation to reduce the possibility that a threat will be missed. 
• Asset Inventory: Customers can build a normalized asset inventory from their security and asset data sources for a consolidated view of assets across the IT estate. 

Additional Capabilities Offered with Asset Visibility 

Endpoint Security Coverage Gaps and Asset Inventory, plus: 

• Asset Criticality Ratings: Assets are tagged based on their importance to operations and data sensitivity, allowing customers to identify and prioritize remediation actions for the greatest impact to risk.  
• Unified Host Inventory: Building off the data from the asset inventory, it creates a single source of truth of assets, allowing customers to get rid of manual tracking processes, like Excel.  

• Data Administration and Management: Provides in-depth analysis and exclusion, reporting and exports, de-duplication and exclusion, end-of-life OS identification, trend analysis, search and filter capabilities, and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) augmentation via export, enabling security teams to keep pace with business changes and control their cyber risk exposure accordingly. 
• Self-service Integrations: Empowering customers to integrate and configure new products as needed facilitates rapid time-to-value by providing increased context for broader asset visibility and coverage gap information for continuous cyber risk reduction. 

“An MDR service with contractual SLAs is foundational to any organization detecting and responding to current threats and attacks. Increasingly, our customers have asked for a way to become more proactive in their approach to cybersecurity, and we have responded! We now offer a portfolio of MCRR services, which includes Asset Visibility—an important first step to risk reduction. It helps our customers understand the assets in their environment and if they are protected,” said Chris Carlson, Chief Product Officer at Critical Start. “We’ve added more value to our MDR offering by including proactive capabilities like Endpoint Security Coverage Gaps at no extra cost while giving customers needing enhanced visibility and management the option to add Asset Visibility services to their security program, all while remaining within the Critical Start ecosystem.”    

For more information on Critical Start Asset Visibility, visit: https://www.criticalstart.com/our-solutions/asset-visibility/. 

About Critical Start  

Organizations today face the challenge of aligning their cyber protection measures with their risk appetite. CRITICALSTART®, a pioneer of the industry’s first Managed Cyber Risk Reduction solutions, provides holistic cyber risk monitoring via its Cyber Operations Risk & Response™ platform, paired with a human-led risk and security operations team, combined with over 8 years of award-winning Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. By continuously monitoring and mitigating cyber risks, Critical Start enables businesses to proactively protect their critical assets with a measurable ROI. The company’s platform provides maturity assessments, peer benchmarking, posture and event analytics, and response capabilities. Its risk and security operations team evaluates and actions threats, risks, vulnerabilities, and performs comprehensive threat intelligence research. Critical Start enables organizations to achieve the highest level of cyber risk reduction for every dollar invested, allowing them to confidently reach their desired levels of risk tolerance.  

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