Levi, Ray and Shoup, Inc.
Superior Consulting for Foolproof Cybersecurity

A large manufacturing company spread across 200 locations discovered a major cybersecurity breach in its infrastructure. Although they worked with a particular security service provider for incident response and breach recovery, they engaged Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS) to get to the root cause of the attack. LRS performed an eight-week-long assessment of their entire security stack, including boundary defenses and end-point security tools, to gain insights about their security controls. The technology company carried out foundational cyber risk analysis where it evaluated the client’s Active Directory and firewall to assess the vulnerabilities. Armed with deep insights on the attack, LRS provided the client with a three-year roadmap that included recommendation documents on ways to improve their security posture across three aspects— strategic, technical, and operational. The roadmap provided a clear vision for various attributes that included: improving day to day operations, closing the gaps between various existing technology systems in the client environment, and building optimized policies, procedures, and internal standards for a security-first business culture.

LRS is a vendor-agnostic value-added reseller (VAR) that offers all the major security solutions available in the market. However, the company differentiates itself in the market with its consultative business strategy and its team that has skilled network and security professionals. The combination of consultative strategy and expertise helps the company cater to the evolving security challenges of its clients.

“The biggest problem today’s companies face is the lack of security professionals who can build a mature security stack,” says Joshua Brant, Security Strategist and Technical Manager of LRS.

“They invest heavily on cybersecurity solutions but lack a well-defined plan to develop a foolproof security framework. Further, segmentation between the disparate security solutions results in loopholes in their security ecosystem, which is often overlooked.”

As an antidote to these predicaments, LRS has built a team of practitioners who have vast experience in providing security services and solutions to different companies of all sizes from across industries. Having been customers of other VARs themselves previously, the team members bring the unique understanding of what it takes to deliver enhanced experiences, which goes beyond consulting.

At the outset of client engagement, team LRS strives to understand clients’ business operations, goals, and observes how the client leadership approaches security. The team pays close attention to learn where the clients are in their security journey and where they want to be. Backed by this knowledge, LRS prescribes relevant security solutions that fit their needs. The company is quick to catch instances where clients have spent lavishly on cybersecurity solutions without fully comprehending how to best build connections between those solutions for sharing real-time threat intelligence. Subsequently it focuses on helping them close those gaps through strategic changes in their configuration and settings, rather than continue to buy more technologies. “Putting a $100 lock on a $5 bike does not help,” highlights Chris Hill, the Security Practice Leader of LRS. “The security roadmap that we recommend for our clients is all about enabling a single pane of glass where automation and orchestration is happening behind the scenes.”

LRS works with major vendors such as IBM, Cisco, and Fortinet to help clients build a security ecosystem where threat intelligence is shared across all of their tools. The company has recently partnered with F5 and Proofpoint to address challenges such as phishing and more.

Considering the current pandemic that has dramatically changed the landscape and forced the security service providers to adapt to the situation, LRS is providing outstanding services through remote connectivity even without being on site. It is holding face-to-face interactions through Microsoft Teams and other collaboration tools. For the future, LRS plans to further enhance its assessment capabilities so that its clients can stay one step ahead of the sophisticated attacks.