Case Study

Digital Silence Increases Service Margins and Expands Service Offerings with PlexTrac

A cybersecurity consulting firm offers new and innovative services to stay ahead of evolving demands by leveraging a reporting automation and collaboration platform to maximize resources and realize a 50 percent time saving.

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Client

Digital Silence

Digital Silence is a world-class boutique cybersecurity consulting firm specializing in penetration testing services, advisory services, and incident response. Established in 2017 in the Denver area, Digital Silence sought to bring together cybersecurity experts with diverse backgrounds, industry experiences, and perspectives to provide better services and support for clients to reach their security goals.

The Digital Silence team, both as an organization and as individuals, strive to be active contributors to the security community and have dedicated training and R&D programs staffed by passionate instructors and researchers.

JT Gaietto, Chief Security Officer at Digital Silence, said, “We are committed to the principle of doing cybersecurity right. We were purchasers of services and now we are trying to be the service providers that we wanted to work with. Today’s cybersecurity threats create headaches for every business. We take the edge off with our sophisticated understanding of threat actors combined with broad business savvy.”

Problem

Archaic Tools and Processes Wasting Valuable Time and Resources

Digital Silence has many clients that need advisory and testing services to support program growth and a number of more mature clients that are now doing iterative assessments. Many clients are SaaS providers that work in continuous cycles, so they need continuous services to ensure they have a real-time view of their security posture. Digital Silence is seeing much higher demand for continuous assessment services so organizations can stay on top of threats and make real progress, not just check a compliance box.

While this shift toward more frequent testing is good for the businesses and good for service providers, it requires new ways of operating to support more testing and new service offerings.

Digital Silence needed a solution to automate their penetration testing and assessment workflows to serve more clients using their existing resources and still deliver superior products.

They also experienced pain in their assessment services dealing with endless spreadsheets used to manage complex questionnaires and frameworks.

Our big problem was time. As a professional services organization, everything is centered around billable hours. The templates were getting corrupted and we were wasting time to get consistency. We spent a lot of time making things look right versus being right.”

Solution

A Platform That Delivers Exceptional Short- and Long-term ROI

Digital Silence encountered PlexTrac as the start-up was forming and immediately resonated with PlexTrac’s mission and the gap in the industry the platform fills. Their interest in PlexTrac was two-fold:

A solution to enhance their penetration test workflow.
A solution to manage their risk assessment data management issues.

The value add PlexTrac could provide in shortening the penetration test engagement and reporting cycle was obvious and immediate. For assessment reporting, they looked at other risk assessment solutions, and those options were substantially more expensive and targeted to single frameworks. For a consultancy offering a mix of services that cover a variety of frameworks for clients, the cost of $25K-$50K per framework with other tool offerings was unjustifiable.

PlexTrac addressed both of their primary pain points at a competitive price point. Additionally, it was clear that the product could grow with their organization as they adapt with evolving demands of the industry. Both from a flexibility perspective and product support perspective, PlexTrac enables Digital Silence to streamline and automate their current processes. It has become a force multiplier to increase their bottom line. And PlexTrac continues to support them as they add new and innovative services.

“

PlexTrac saved time and gave a central content storage area for everyone to access. The environment is constantly changing. As we change to meet it and provide that feedback to PlexTrac, the PlexTrac team has been super supportive and responsive. Having a partner that can run as fast as the industry is a game changer.”

Chief Security Officer

JT Gaietto

Results

Exponential Time Savings Translate to Higher Client Satisfaction and Expanded Service Offerings

Digital Silence has used PlexTrac for approximately two years. In that time, PlexTrac has become an essential part of their tech stack.

They have maximized their value from the platform by using all its capabilities to both reduce the manual workload in their existing workflows and to support the creation of new innovative service offerings to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

For clients interested in continuous improvement and ongoing testing services, Digital Silence has recently begun using PlexTrac’s Client Portal feature to provide visibility on a continuous basis. The ability to provide access through a permission-based portal has increased client stickiness.

Gaietto stated, “Continuous vulnerability monitoring is becoming more important. One customer had an expensive tool that was basically doubling up their information. Because we could provide that data by allowing them to access it in PlexTrac via the portal, they were able to get rid of the unnecessary tool. This is one way PlexTrac has helped us provide more value to our clients.”

From a QC perspective, our time went from four to five hours to thirty minutes per engagement. That’s an 89 percent time savings in this area alone.”

Overall, we’ve seen at least a 50 percent time saving on our reporting processes.”

Finally, Digital Silence is deriving benefit from PlexTrac by using it to support innovative service offerings. They have identified a rapidly growing interest in purple teaming and continuous assessment, such that they have created a special offering called Heliotrope. This service allows Digital Silence to provide real-time feedback at points in the testing process so the client is educated about their issues throughout an engagement. Digital Silence uses PlexTrac’s Runbooks feature to support this collaborative service offering.

Gaietto said, “I recommend PlexTrac particularly for the way it simplifies our processes and expedites our quality control workflows. PlexTrac has enabled us to scale our services and has grown with us.”

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