Atlantic Constructors

Atlantic Constructors is Central Virginia’s leading service and construction manufacturing provider for commercial and industrial markets. Their highly automated 130,000 square feet fabrication shop and 30,000 square feet office complex support approximately 700 highly-skilled employees, allowing them to efficiently provide complete turn-key solutions. Read on to learn why they chose Blumira’s SIEM solution for their manufacturing environment.

The Challenge: Finding a Simple, Effective SIEM

As IT Director, Jim Paolicelli started as a consultant at ACI, moving into a director role with a small team of help desk employees to support both the company’s IT and security functions. One of their goals is to keep the organization safe and secure from security threats like ransomware and account takeover, while keeping an eye on any abnormalities in their environment.

While working with a few outside vendors to conduct security assessments for ACI, SIEM (security information and event management) systems kept coming up as a recommended solution to gain greater visibility into their security posture and help harden their defenses.

After attending a virtual CIO conference, Paolicelli met with several security vendors including Siemplify, Managed Engine and Blumira in search of a SIEM that would fit the needs of their small team. Their requirements were: easy to set up and use on a daily basis and could be monitored and managed by an IT administrator without a security background.

The Solution: Blumira’s Cloud SIEM Designed for IT

While many SIEMs require security expertise or extensive training to operate, Blumira’s cloud SIEM is built to be easy for small IT teams to manage threat detection and response for their organizations. ACI chose Blumira for the simplification of its platform that makes their IT team’s day-to-day more automated and effective.

“I’ve worked with SIEMs for over 30 years; many collect logs, but analyzing them is time-consuming. I don’t have the staff dedicated to sit and read logs all day or with the skillset to analyze our data. We chose Blumira for its simplicity – I needed a solution that would simplify, consolidate and show me what I really need to see,” Paolicelli said.

Blumira’s platform automates security monitoring by collecting logs and analyzing them using behavior-based detection rules that come fine-tuned to reduce noisy alerts. Prioritized findings come with pre-built playbooks to guide IT teams through next steps for threat response.

“Our IT help desk employee is in charge of monitoring Blumira. Without requiring a ton of experience, Blumira’s platform provides very simplified language and built-in workflows that help him also learn about security as he uses the product – it’s not overloading him with alerts and he doesn’t need to sift through hundreds of thousands of logs.”

By explaining findings in plain language and providing clear question-and-answer workflows, Blumira’s goal is to help educate IT teams on security and move their organizations toward greater security maturity over time.

Easy Deployment, Visibility Into Unknown Threats & “Wicked-Fast” SecOps Support

The deployment of Blumira is also designed to be simple enough for IT teams to roll out without requiring additional resources or personnel.

“I was able to do it myself about 90% within an afternoon – and then Dave (Blumira Technical Account Manager) stepped in to help tweak things as well. It was easy to set up the Duo Security, Crowdstrike, Microsoft 365, Azure and Windows Server integrations using Blumira’s excellent documentation,” Paolicelli said.

Once deployed, ACI’s IT team was able to gain a peace of mind after receiving findings from Blumira’s platform on events they would have never seen before, such as insight into Microsoft 365 security group creations and logins from outside of the country.

“There were a few Microsoft 365 findings where I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, but support has been great – I was getting a wicked-fast response time from the team,” Paolicelli said.

Acting as an extension of limited IT teams, Blumira’s security operations (SecOps) team offers support to help our customers better understand findings, dig in deeper for investigation and provide guided response advice. They are available 24/7 for urgent priority issues — learn more about Blumira’s support.