Bringing in an external SOC partner for effective system security

The client

Ulyssys is a software development company with more than 30 years of history, skilled primarily in building custom software, but with extensive experience in customising and implementing off-the-shelf solutions as well. The size of the 100% Hungarian-owned Ulyssys allows it to provide its clients with training, IT audits and application management, among other things, in addition to software development. Most of its partners work in public administration, but it has also had numerous R&D and commercial engagements.

The IT leader

Ákos Küs has been working at Ulyssys for more than 20 years and currently leads the IT team of twelve. His team primarily handles internal and external operations: besides maintaining and developing the company’s own systems, it is also responsible for the operational support of clients’ systems.

IT security outsourced: the story of a rational decision

The relationship between Andrews and Ulyssys goes back more than 20 years, to the time when they carried out IT audits together. Even then Andrews drew their attention to its services, but the company had no need for them yet. Then in 2022 the question of IT security came to the fore at Ulyssys, so they approached Andrews to strengthen the company’s system together with the help of the SOC service.

In Ákos Küs’s view, every company operating IT systems should have a monitoring service like this. Although this is a solution companies could implement themselves, since the knowledge is available and the tools are accessible and customisable, at the end of the day it is not worth it for companies to dedicate separate resources to building and maintaining such a system. It should be handled by someone who does only this, has the specialists for it, has the work schedule set up for it, and has the resources for 24/7 availability.

In IT security the most important thing is staying up to date, but in a team of ten it is almost impossible for one or more colleagues to deal with this area on a daily basis. That is why, in his opinion, it is a rational and rewarding solution for a company to bring in an external provider for this.

Continuous protection, effective monitoring

To set up the SOC system, Ulyssys first designated the infrastructure elements it considered critical, such as the firewalls, the central authentication servers, the servers providing the more important services and the more important development servers. Their logs are collected automatically and made available to Andrews for analysis.

Andrews, as a managed security service provider, sends a monthly report on what happened in the given period, which proves useful. They can create a substantial set of tasks for their team from it, because these reports reflect real faults that they have to remedy. This is how they achieve less and less noise in their logs.

Another significant benefit of the cooperation is that their team is increasingly adopting an IT security-focused way of thinking. According to Ákos Küs, this requires a separate mindset, which can be learned, and their collaboration with Andrews has played a significant part in this.

Comprehensive protection

Ulyssys holds numerous certifications whose requirements it has to meet. It pays special attention to achieving the highest level of system security for itself and its clients. For this reason, it is further extending the scope of the SOC service used so far, to cover the monitoring of the system as fully as possible and to notice every anomaly.