So Energy is Trusting Preemptive MDR to Keep the Lights on

Essential services — think utilities, water treatment, the digitized grid — are increasingly in the crosshairs of cybercriminals and nation-state actors. Take one down and you’ve hit millions of people. The disruption is massive and the economic cost, even bigger.

Renewables have added even more IT and OT to the attack surface.

So Energy delivers renewable electricity, including solar and EV charging solutions, to around 300,000 UK homes. Anybody – seriously, just about anybody – can hook up a solar panel and inverter to the grid.

The company is driven to make the complicated simple for their fellow humans. Can’t more things be as easy as flipping the light switch on? In addition to ease, So Energy decided it needed 24/7 security operations.

Of course, always-on meant outsourcing.

The company vetted three different options and chose Rapid7.

IT Security Manager Andy Lee calls MDR coverage “all encompassing.”

So Energy put Rapid7’s MDR (Managed Detection and Response) at the center of his program. He now knows he has trusted eyes on his complex cloud environment 24/7 “which is not a thing I could ever do.” It integrates easily with the company’s existing assets and tooling.

And because it’s preemptive MDR, it shuts down attacker operations before they can ever shut down his.

Lee also uses Rapid7’s managed vulnerability so all endpoints, patches, and configurations are locked down, and CloudSec to monitor engineer workflows, builds, and deployments and highlight possible exploits before a malicious actor can.

Evidence of the good decision started racking up quickly. An So employee clicked on a phishing link. MDR nullified the threat right on the endpoint, game over.

Rapid7 is there for that.