Website Agency & Branding 

The RealBranding agency has over 20 years of web development experience serving hundreds of household brands and even a Cathedral.

While the agency was focused on improving on the overall customer branding, as the agency grew, the company found itself battling with more and more cybersecurity threats. The net effect was to hamper growth, and increase the support burden. There were times the agency had to solely focus on the problem web domains, effectively ceasing work on new creative projects, which generated  the majority of its revenues.

The team has lots of experience in design and web marketing, but doesn’t have a dedicated cybersecurity professional. Instead it would rely on its devops teams to try and find the root causes of each attack, and hadn’t adopted cybersecurity standards. Managing Director Michael Taite said:

“Every week at least one of our clients would develop a problem with a website. We were constantly putting out fires. As we grew the client base, this just made the problem exponentially worse and was a real barrier to growth.”

Patform Hardening

The company initially looked to harden its infrastructure and develop a comprehensive reference build. However, as the installed base of sites grew over time, nearly every prior build had different custom elements, and sometimes different webstacks, cloud providers and services, in line with the customer requirements.

Inevitably, staff turnover exacerbated the legacy code issue. Although the company had documentation standards in place for each new build, the rapid pace of new client onboarding meant that sometimes the documentation was not prioritised.

RealBranding did not have any formal threat detection process in place.  It meant they were often blindsided by the incoming threats, and sometimes  from a phone call from their clients. Although the company monitored all its servers and had comprehensive uptime checking,  out of business hours coverage, it didn’t assess service degradation, slow performance, cyber exploits or data egress as it simply didn’t have the tools to manage and control its diverse environment. The company was often blindsided by new threats.

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Why Verified Threat?

The company selected VerifiedThreat to provide constant vigilance and support for new attack threats and techniques across the cloud and the legacy platforms. 

RealBranding wanted one platform that could monitor all of the installed base of servers, alert on new threats, and was simple to deploy and manage. Critically, they didn’t want their operational staff disturbed by alerts and issues during anti-social hours, and wanted to ensure threats really could be prioritized to meet the company’s goals.

Results

• Server Uptime and Maintenance: RealBranding saw around a 60% decrease in server maintenance, and a corresponding increase is service availability.. 
• Significant Cost Savings: VerifiedThreat reduced the hard costs on hosting and CPU costs by around 35%, but the real benefit was on freeing developer resources to concentrate on new higher margin development work for new clients.
• Customer Confidence: The agency's customers benefited from the improvement in service quality, and felt the agency was becoming much more proactive.
• Operational Efficiency: One platform to manage the legacy and cloud clients allowed RealBranding to have an intelligent layer wrapping its legacy builds, while it migrated older clients to its latest hardened reference builds. 
• OnGoing Threat Protection: VerifiedThreat was able to ensure the company was on the front-foot, proactive and not worrying about which customer would have the next set of issues.

Impact

By using Verified Threat, RealBranding had the following impact:

• Technical: One platform across legacy and new cloud services which could be used to monitor and protect the entire client base, effectively acting as an intelligent security wrapper proved to be a game changer for the company.
• Business: Focusing on productive revenue generating work was the biggest financial benefit, but cost savings on maintenance and hosting bills, as well as increased customer satisfaction and service for the legacy clients proved critical.

“VerifiedThreat really helped to give us a competitive advantage, reduced our support burden, and allowed us to focus on new revenue generating business”

Michael Taite, Managing Director RealBranding

Please reach out to our sales team and book in a demo to see the platform

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