Leveling the Cybersecurity Playing Field: Security Weekly Podcast Recap

In a recent interview with Adrian Sanabria on the Security Weekly podcast, Blumira CEO Jim Simpson discussed the unique cybersecurity challenges faced by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and how Blumira addresses these issues.

Cybersecurity solutions are designed for large enterprises, making them too complex and expensive for SMBs. Blumira tackles this problem by simplifying the user experience. The platform is designed to ingest all of a customer's data without the need for manual configuration, automatically turning on detections and providing vendor integrations out-of-the-box.

Jim explains, "We tell them [users], ‘Send us all of your data,’ so they don't have to think about which log files, which APIs to hook up. We just say send everything because we figured out how to ingest at scale without it being a cost problem for us."

This streamlined onboarding process allows customers to get up and running with the product in a matter of hours, as opposed to the months-long implementation times often associated with traditional SIEM solutions.

Jim also highlighted the importance of delivering actionable insights to SMBs, rather than overwhelming them with hundreds or thousands of alerts. The Blumira SIEM platform generates "findings" that provide clear guidance on potential security issues.

"We make no assumption about the operator's knowledge when they're operating on the finding," he said. "We have…a decision tree that we walk them through for them to solve the problem themselves." And if users require additional assistance, Blumira's small but mighty team of SOC analysts is available to provide support in real-time.

Behind the scenes, Blumira's detection engineering team leverages the company's access to customer data to quickly identify and respond to emerging threats, deploying new detections without requiring any action from the end-user. This agile approach allows Blumira to provide more effective protection than many of its competitors.

When asked about the future, Jim emphasized the company's commitment to listening to customer needs and continuously improving the platform: "We're just going to continue focusing on how we can make it easier for them to get into it, how we can add more functionality with what they've got today, how we can listen to the things that they're looking for and add those things into the platform itself."

As a final note, Jim shared the story behind Blumira's hedgehog mascot, Mira, explaining that the animal served as a fitting metaphor for the company: “Our co-founders have an affinity for hedgehogs, because they're kind of spiky on the outside…kind of like the security practice, but soft on the inside, like us, and very, very food motivated, like everybody.”

The interview provided valuable insights into the challenges faced by SMBs and Blumira's innovative approach to addressing these issues. As cyber threats continue to evolve and target organizations of all sizes, the need for accessible, effective, and user-friendly security solutions has never been greater.