Gaining Visibility, Reducing Risk: How Surveil Took Control Of Its Attack Surface With Intruder

Cloud environments offer unmatched scalability, but they also present a daunting challenge: securing an attack surface that is vast, dynamic, and often poorly understood. Without complete visibility into their assets, businesses risk leaving themselves exposed, opening the door to attackers. 

Surveil, a leader in cloud insights and optimization, recognized this risk and partnered with Intruder to gain visibility of its attack surface and reduce exposure. We spoke to Laurence Dale, CISO & Product Director (M365) at Surveil, to get the full story. 

The Challenge: Staying on top of a sprawling cloud environment

For Surveil, maintaining visibility of the assets within their Microsoft Azure environment was a significant challenge.

As developers frequently spun up new cloud services, Surveil was left asking critical questions like, “Are all services accounted for?” and “Which assets are unintentionally exposed to the internet?” 

In such a rapidly changing environment, ensuring visibility of their attack surface became an urgent priority to reduce risk. 

This challenge isn’t unique to Surveil. Research by Intruder found that organizations typically have visibility of just 21% of their internet-facing assets, leaving the remaining 79% untracked and vulnerable.

The Solution: Attack surface visibility that drives down risk

As a leader in attack surface management with powerful capabilities for cloud environments, Intruder offered exactly what Surveil needed to protect its growing attack surface.

Surveil leveraged Intruder’s integration with Microsoft Azure to continuously discover and automatically add newly deployed cloud assets to the Intruder platform. With automatic scanning enabled, Surveil ensures that new assets are assessed for vulnerabilities and exposures the moment they’re discovered.

Laurence said, “The Azure integration at Intruder was one of the key attractions for us as a Microsoft cloud-native business. The integration allows us to scan all subscriptions, find all the assets, and pick up on changes in our evolving environment. This allows our team to act on changes as needed and keep our overall risk posture as low as possible.”

As well as asset discovery, the Azure integration enables Surveil to optimize its cloud budget by helping to identify and remove forgotten or unnecessary services. This not only reduces risk but also saves money by cutting cloud expenses.

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Mean time to remediate (MTTR) is a crucial metric for Laurence in evaluating the effectiveness of Surveil's vulnerability management program and ensuring compliance. Intruder helps the Surveil team keep MTTR low in several ways. Intruder’s noise-filtered results allow Surveil to prioritize and address its most critical issues, while the remediation advice supports the team in implementing quick and effective fixes. Plus, Intruder’s reporting and analytics make it easy for Laurence to track and report on MTTR, helping the team continuously improve and stay compliant.

Laurence said, “By clearly providing visibility of exposures in the great user interface that Intruder has, the team are able to assess what’s discovered and act immediately to keep our MTTR as low as possible, meeting our policy objectives.”

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Over the past year, Surveil has successfully achieved both ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certifications, supported by the effective vulnerability management program they’ve been able to implement and maintain with Intruder. Intruder has not only helped Surveil meet compliance requirements with ease, but also streamlined the process through its seamless integration with Drata, which automates the sharing of vulnerability scanning evidence with their compliance platform.

Laurence said: “Here at Surveil, we take security compliance very seriously. By integrating Intruder with our environment for vulnerability management and leveraging our automation platform with Drata, the two come together to drive down security risk and maintain the compliance needed.”

The Outcome: Comprehensive visibility, reduced risk, and seamless compliance

Implementing Intruder has transformed Surveil’s approach to asset discovery, vulnerability management and compliance:

• Unmatched Visibility: Intruder’s automated asset discovery has significantly reduced the time assets remain exposed, helping Surveil minimize risks and close security gaps across their dynamic environment.
• Smarter Asset Management: By identifying and decommissioning unused or redundant assets, Surveil has not only tightened its security posture but also achieved cost savings on cloud expenses.
• Simplified Compliance Processes: Intruder’s integration with Drata automates compliance reporting, streamlining audits and making it easier to maintain ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 standards.

Laurence summarized Intruder’s value: “Intruder has brought significant value to our business on multiple levels. For our security team, we’ve gained visibility into changes within our environment through dynamic scanning, allowing us to maintain a low risk posture. The integration with Drata has streamlined our audit processes, helping us evidence our findings effectively. Ultimately, this has enabled us to earn and maintain trust with our customers by demonstrating our commitment to security and compliance.”

With Intruder, organizations can minimize risk and stay ahead of attackers, even as their attack surfaces expand and evolve. Ready to take control of your attack surface? Learn more about attack surface management with Intruder or book some time to chat with us.