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 Andy’s program. He 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” he said

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

Lee also uses Rapid7’s managed vulnerability service so all endpoints, patches, and configurations are locked down. He and his team then leverage Rapid7's cloud-native application protection platform to monitor engineer workflows, builds, and deployments as well as highlight possible exploits before a malicious actor can.

Evidence that they'd made the right decision in going with Rapid7 came when a So employee mistakenly clicked on a phishing link. The result? MDR services nullified the threat right there on the endpoint...game over.

“Easy to deploy, easy to manage…Rapid7 can solve a lot of problems for you,” said Lee. Rapid7 is there for that.