OK, “outsmarts” might not be the right word here. “Outworks” doesn’t quite fit either. Read on, and maybe you can help me come up with a better title.

There are many paths to success in small business, and we should know – we are one. Unable to simply pour resources at a problem, SMBs look for that needle-in-a-haystack solution that gives them what they need without demanding what they don’t have – too much time, money, staff, or training.

At Nomic, that’s our bread and butter. Our new “Insight” product is a straight-up security, health, and visibility tool with no stuffy add-ons. It leans on machine learning where it makes sense, utilizing a straightforward interface to let our users (and our support team) find what they’re looking for, quickly.

What Insight Does Differently

Strategically, we knew we needed to design a platform that could monitor internal security and health at scale, removing unnecessary bells and whistles to keep costs in check.

Tactically, we came up with a solution based on Network Flows. Insight consolidates and archives meta data, threat intelligence, and other network information into one easy-to-digest flow record for every single conversation happening on your network – North, South, East, and West … “Good” or “bad.” This includes external traffic and what’s between the endpoints, enriched with threat intel, ASN, and geo-based data, like:

• Source and destination IPs, ports, and application protocols
• ASN numbers and organizational info
• Country info
• CINS active threat intelligence and other community threat feeds
• Flow size with timestamps

In a cyber knife fight, scrappy SOCs need the facts, and they need them fast. By providing streamlined metadata about threats, enriched with all the pertinent information from relevant sources, you get a complete picture of what’s going on without getting bogged down in the details. Insight cuts the fluff and gives you the power to make good decisions fast.

As we continue to build out Insight, it looks like this:

• Flows enriched with multi-point threat data
• An archive to search every Flow on your network
• Automations in the form of ML-driven, Flow-based metrics
• Threat Signals and Alerting based on Automations
• Autonomous Threat Defense from the Outpost
• A fully managed solution with 24/7/365 support

The Secret Sauce

Another thing SMBs need is an expert team to back them up. This is where Nomic really shines.

In a big-box competitor scenario, a harried system administrator may have to wait 15 minutes or longer just to talk to a first-level support agent. If the problem is deemed urgent enough, the call will then get escalated, and you’ll go through a phone tree of vendor bureaucracy just to wind up with your Account Manager, who may again refer you to an outside layer of tech support. You may not talk to the same person twice.

At Nomic, it’s different. When you call, you’ll get someone you might already know by name, and you’ll likely get someone who had a hand in product development themselves. The technology is what gets us in the door, but our support is what keeps our clients coming back. We know our SMBs and their problems, we’re on the phone, and then we’re back in our offices, developing new products, like Insight, to respond to their particular flavor of problems.

Many times, we’ll beat them to the punch. One piece of feedback we’ve received is that we’re surprisingly proactive. Often, we’ll find ourselves on the phone with a client letting them know they had a security issue (but we’ve fixed it), and they weren’t even aware that they’d had an incident. We figure it’s part of the managed package, but when dealing with a powerful, lightweight solution like Insight, customers are often surprised at how much they get for the price point.

You could say we offer boutique services to niche clientele: We understand the problems smaller, overworked IT teams face, technological and otherwise. The secret sauce for us, and the backbone that supports Insight and all our products, is the personal level of attention and customization each partner gets as soon as they deploy a Nomic solution.

The Insight Advantage

Overall, Insight proves its mettle by giving SMBs everything they need to respond at scale without crashing their systems – metaphorically and physically.

Insight tells you what you need to know about a threat. It organizes flows consisting of relevant traffic metadata and enriched with global threat feeds. Utilizing a combination of traditional rule-based tools, threat intelligence, and automations based on machine learning, It monitors the internal network for interesting traffic, and alerts there’s something on your network worth looking at, without filling up your inbox.

Insight is about more than just security. While we’re in there, we figured we might as well let you know what we see under the hood. Automations can provide up/down service monitoring, network health metrics, and analysis on throughput spikes and flow latency so you know how to keep your network running at its best.

Insight automatically blocks threats. Insight’s internal network intelligence mirrors the autonomous security controls of the Outpost, blocking threats as they happen in real-time. Outpost’s defense and response capabilities have the power to block threats at the door and leverage Network Cloaking to hide your assets from an attacker’s view. In other words, Insight is part of a fully managed MNDR solution.

Insight simplifies threat management. All the Network Flows and any relevant threat data are contained in Nomic HQ. This includes enriched IP details, searchable Alerts and Flows, an event summary of all IPs, and our proprietary CINS scores, and the block status of any event.

Insight provides senior-level security support on each and every call. When an incident strikes, you’ll get a voice and an expert, not a phone tree and a order-taker. We take pride in taking care of our clients, product line, and reputation.

Insight is a rare, simple security solution in a world of ‘bigger means better.’ We built Insight off the belief that ‘better is better’ and think that streamlined technology, friendly UIs, all-in-one-place threat stories, and personal relationships with the software engineers are ‘better.’

I guess that’s how Insight does, in fact, “outsmart” the competition.