Shared services specialist that delivers a wide range of key services, including IT, Payroll, HR and Print Services, to a rapidly growing portfolio of public sector customers in the South West, including NHS England, the regional Clinical Commissioning Group, Plymouth and Torbay Councils, Plym Academy Trust, and many other vital healthcare, education and community entities.But with recent incidents bringing these organisations’ cyber security under more intense scrutiny from central Government than ever before, reactive strategies based around security software had been exposed as ineffective.To deliver security that was fit for purpose, the company needed to be able to constantly monitor its customers’ networks, analyse evolving data, and use this to counter threats predictively.

This produced a number of challenges.With a growing customer base, they needed to deploy security rapidly across the complexities of multiple sites with highly differentiated requirements (every GP practice, for example, is essentially an independent business, with its own operational processes and procedures).They needed to change users’ behaviours as frictionlessly as possible, so that they learnt to act securely by default.And they needed to demonstrate real value for money and ROI against the additional Government cyber security funding that had been made available in the wake of the WannaCry attack.

On all counts – and more – Reliance acsn delivered.

For a new era of threats, a new kind of security solution – and a new way of evaluating the companies that provide it – was necessary. Historically, public sector IT strategy was up against ever-dwindling budgets, so organisations went for the cheapest security stance possible: deploying reactive software that would supposedly do the job for them and enable them – on paper – to put a tick in the compliance box.

But this over-reliance on technology meant there were few – if any – internal customer experts who understood IT security issues and could impart security knowledge and awareness across the organisation. Further, WannaCry and a whole raft of other cyber incidents had already demonstrated that the reactive mindset that security software encourages is not an effective defence against today’s threats in any event.

What the organisation needed, was a totally different security model. And were looking for a provider who would use both technology and human expertise to monitor and make constant sense of each customer’s ongoing security posture and the threats ranged against it, predict what was likely to happen next, and then produce clear and flexible action plan options.

After just one month, the outcome was unequivocal – Reliance acsn and its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service outperformed all the other providers.