Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face increasing pressure to strengthen cybersecurity while maintaining agility and cost efficiency. IT leaders must move beyond reactive defense and toward operationalized maturity — creating systems that are resilient, scalable and audit-ready.
Using guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework and FINRA’s cybersecurity practices, enterprise-grade security principles can be adapted for use by SMB security leaders.
This includes advanced zero-trust implementation and integrating extended detection and response (EDR) with security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms to enable continuous exposure management and Software as a Service (SaaS) security posture management.
By adopting these approaches, SMB IT leaders can transform security from a cost center into a growth enabler — achieving high-level protection and compliance without sacrificing innovation or speed.
Advanced Zero-Trust Implementation for SMBs
Aaron Bugal, field CISO for Sophos, explains that zero trust is a journey, not necessarily a specific technology choice or stack. Rather, it is a blend of process, people and technology.
He says that identity has become the new security perimeter, requiring phishing-resistant, auditable, multifactor authentication to verify users and devices continuously.
Network segmentation limits the blast radius of breaches, while modern firewalls combining software-defined WAN, VPN and zero-trust capabilities simplify secure access. Continuous verification and automation enhance visibility and reduce manual workload, maintaining “transient trust” that adapts in real time.
“Around-the-clock detection and response are essential, making 24/7 monitoring and early alert investigation critical,” Bugal says.
He adds that leveraging external expertise and automation can strengthen defenses and free teams to focus on strategic risk reduction.
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Integrating EDR With SIEM/SOAR Platforms
WatchGuard field CTO Adam Winston says that when integrating EDR with SIEM and SOAR platforms, the goal should be to measure efficiency in the security operations center.
This can be achieved by setting up metrics such as mean time to respond or contain and running regular simulations to identify areas for improvement — without the pressure of real-world scenarios.
“Organizations should start by ensuring that their EDR telemetry feeds directly into the SIEM to provide centralized visibility,” he says.
Teams can then use breach and attack simulation tools to routinely test the detection of new threats.
Winston adds that it’s important to tune SOAR playbooks based on test results to improve automated containment and facilitate case enrichment.
“That way, teams can validate that the data is normalized and consistent across EDR, SIEM and SOAR for accurate correlation,” he says.
Continuous Exposure Management Strategies
Michelle Abraham, senior research director for security and trust at IDC, says visibility into all of the organization’s assets is the foundation of exposure management.
“The asset data should be aggregated and managed holistically, so all risks can be managed as one instead of in silos,” she explains.
Once the exposures and their associated assets are prioritized based on their importance to the organization, remediation or mitigation efforts remove or block exposures from being exploited by attackers.
“Since exposures are found faster than ever, organizations need to move more quickly to fix issues as well,” Abraham notes.
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Identity, Threat Detection and Response
Dana Simberkoff, chief risk, privacy and information security officer at AvePoint, says identity, threat detection and response naturally complements zero trust architectures by ensuring that even verified, authenticated users are behaving within expected parameters.
“Your users — humans — are always going to be your weakest link,” Simberkoff says. “By focusing not only on identity but also content and context, you can help to make sure that human error does not lead to catastrophic consequences.”
Winston adds that a mature ITDR solution should not only respond to account creation and removal but must also continuously detect and respond to identity misuse across sessions, devices and behaviors.
SaaS Security Posture Management
SaaS Security Posture Management enhances cloud protection by ensuring SaaS environments remain securely configured, access is appropriately governed, and risky behavior is promptly detected and corrected.
“It provides a unified view of security posture across all SaaS applications, exposing misconfigurations, risky settings and excessive permissions,” Winton says.
It also identifies overprivileged users, dormant accounts, unmanaged service accounts and risky OAuth app connections across SaaS environments, offering guided fixes for common misconfigurations to reduce manual workload and response time.
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DevSecOps Implementation for Growing Teams
Winston says growing teams that want to implement DevSecOps successfully must build code scanning, dependency checks and Infrastructure as Code scanning early in the pipeline to catch issues before deployment.
From there, teams should automate wherever possible, using continuous integration/continuous deployment or delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automate testing, compliance checks and remediation guidance to reduce manual effort and human error.
“It’s also essential to standardize secure coding practice by providing developers with secure coding guidelines, reusable templates and security-approved libraries,” he says.
Building a Business Case for Advanced Security
Bugal says a compelling business case positions security as a strategic risk management initiative, not just a technical expense.
It begins by identifying critical assets and quantifying potential impacts from breaches or downtime, linking security improvements to tangible outcomes such as revenue protection, customer trust and regulatory compliance.
“Demonstrating efficiency through tuned and optimized people, processes and technology linked to industry context strengthens your case,” he says.
