What is the difference between Security Management Orchestration™ (SMO) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)

What is Security Management Orchestration™?

Most people in cybersecurity are familiar with SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response). SOAR refers to technologies that enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team.  SOAR is operations-based. But what about the management side?

Enter Security Management Orchestration™ or SMO™. What is SMO™? SMO™ is technology that allows organizations to manage cybersecurity in a holistic and integrated way. It is the management sister to SOAR.

What are the Benefits of Security Management Orchestration™?

There are a lot of moving pieces in any organization’s cybersecurity program. Let’s name just a few:

• IT Risk Assessments
• IT Audits
• Vulnerability Assessments
• Vendor Assessments
• Pen Testing
• Incident Response Training
• Incident Response Playbooks
• User Training
• Social Engineering

Benefit 1: No more loose spreadsheets, documents, and folders of screenshots. A quality SMO tool will give you a digital hub for all your program’s assets. But that’s the very least, more on this in benefit 2.

Benefit 2: Everything is integrated, giving you a holistic view of your program. SMO tools and technology take all the functions of cybersecurity and let them work together. An IT audit and risk assessment printed out and tucked away in folders on the shelf can’t communicate with each other. They’re also just a snapshot in time. SMO™ tools bring these assets together and let them communicate. For example, you can see how just one piece of evidence affects both your compliance standing and your risk ratings. 

Benefit 3: Saves you time. Enormous amounts of time that you can reallocate to higher-value tasks. When you’re utilizing SMO™, you are deduplicating repetitive actions, allowing technology to automate traditionally manual tasks, and turning report generation into a one-click action.

Benefit 4: Increased cybersecurity. Using SMO™ tools and technology will inevitably mature your information security program. Not only do these tools bring your IT audit, risk assessment, and vendor assessment results to life, it puts them front and center for continuous monitoring and assessment. 

Security Management Orchestration™ Tools

As the industry’s pioneer of SMO™, Rivial Data Security developed software that allows our clients to easily and holistically manage their cybersecurity program in an extremely integrated fashion. It’s called the Rivial Platform.

The Rivial Platform is defining the SMO™ space. We are setting a standard for helping financial institutions manage program governance, IT risk, compliance, testing, vendor cybersecurity, and incident response. 

The key to effectively managing cybersecurity is understanding the ecosystem, how everything works together. That's why the Rivial Platform has modules that communicate with each other. 

We've debuted Compliance-Risk syncing technology to save Information Security Officers enormous amounts of time while simultaneously maturing their cybersecurity program.  This allows ISOs and others managing cybersecurity to stop using all their time on tedious duplicative work and instead refocus their energy on high-value tasks while the Rivial Platform does the work. 

The Rivial Platform is continuous. This is something examiners are looking for more and more. Specifically, our continuous it audit and risk assessment services are performed right in the software. Not only does this elevate your IT security, but it makes exam time so much less stressful.

Reporting is a one-click action in the Rivial Platform. Not only can you easily access your audit report, risk assessment results, or vulnerability results quickly and easily, but also a custom Board of Directors report!

We don’t mean to brag (ok, maybe a little), but Rivial Data Security has set out to define Security Management Orchestration™ and the Rivial Platform is what it looks like. And to be honest, what we’ve described here is just the tip of the iceberg!

We want to help your organization institute Security Management Orchestration™, increase your cybersecurity, and save time while doing it. Register for a weekly occurring Rivial Platform demo or schedule your own one-on-one.