Expert discusses Grant Thornton and Exabeam partnership

Grant Thornton partners with Exabeam to meet the needs of the Russell 2000.

The challenge

As an international collection of independent audit, tax and advisory firms, Grant Thornton must meet the challenge of working with customers at different points in its cybersecurity journey. Some customers might be in the process of handling an ongoing incident or breach without sufficient infrastructure, while others are trying to understand what steps to take to make sure their organisation isn’t the subject of tomorrow’s front page headlines. Because Grant Thornton focuses on the Russell 2000 — the high end of the middle market — its customers demand an affordable solution that isn’t going to take years to be designed and deployed.

The results

Grant Thornton decided to partner with Exabeam because it needed a solution that was reasonably priced, could be deployed quickly and sustain its predicted growth without constant cost increases. It typically completed an Exabeam system integration within just one day and then started seeing meaningful results within a few weeks as baseline behaviours were established through user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA). Grant Thornton typically recommends that its customers deploy the full Exabeam suite of products, but that they primarily focus on the Exabeam Data Lake and Exabeam Advanced Analytics.

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Designed for effective use by users at all levels

Grant Thornton wants its customers to immediately recognise the value of its implementation and the integrated Exabeam user interface — in particular, the Session Timelines — conveys that value in an easy-to-understand manner. Even non-technical users can understand the way each event appears alongside its time and location, with all critical data in one place to enable an instant response.

Helping the SOC achieve its charter

One of the ​many aspects of the Exabeam solution is Data Lake. Creating a central repository that contains all of the data that the tool needs means that analysts don’t have to waste their time looking for issues across multiple tools. And the tight integration with Advanced Analytics means that the answers to security issues are surfaced automatically, without the need for highly-skilled analysts carrying out deep, time-consuming manual investigations.

“Exabeam is very open to comments from the clients, recommendations from us as partners and it is very open to actually integrating those requests into the products. It has rolled those recommendations in within weeks, which is an amazingly fast pace for a company that is very methodical about releases….”

Don Sheehan
Director, Cyber Defense Solutions
Grant Thornton