Texas United CISO: “eSentire is the best decision I ever made.”

“We look at eSentire to be the experts. We trust them implicitly. One of the key differentiators I feel about eSentire in their response methodology is they’re with us through the thick and thin till the end so we're comfortable until the issue is resolved.”

Texas United Management is a privately-held minerals manufacturing company that produces food-grade salt and brine for chemical plants. The primary responsibility of the security team at Texas United is centered around managing their cyber risk.

On a foundational level, their priorities to manage their cyber risk are three-fold:

1. Identify the specific cyber risks impacting the organization,

2. Educate the executive leadership team on those potential risks, and

3. Find the best solutions to mitigate the risks within the organization.

“When I first started this opportunity, it was a little bit overwhelming,” Ray Texter, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Texas United Management, said. “We knew our staff was limited and focused on the work they were doing today. Asking them to do additional work from an IT perspective and becoming cyber experts was not realistic.”

In fact, the Texas United team was facing multiple security challenges, such as:

• Lack of 24/7 threat detection capabilities and cyber expertise for threat response

• Adherence to compliance requirements

• Demonstrating enhancements to security maturity and ROI to leadership

• Security expertise to manage the IoT environment within the supply chain

• Cybersecurity skills gap

It was clear to Texas United that they needed to augment their staff, or engage a cybersecurity provider that would act as an extension of their own team.

Although an MSSP may have reduced some of their workload, MSSPs provide more of a “reporting functionality”, leaving the in-house team to make the decisions. However, Ray knew that his team needed more. They needed a partner to make some of the decisions at a critical time to protect the assets, reduce the threats, and contain it within their organization.

They needed a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider that they could rely on as a trusted advisor and that was focused on people, process, and technology. Moreover, Ray needed their MDR provider to have quick response capabilities that could help his team mature their security program. That’s where eSentire comes in.

eSentire provided the cybersecurity team at Texas United with 24/7 MDR services to support security event monitoring, 24/7 threat detection and response, and security technology expertise. Throughout Ray’s tenure at Texas United, eSentire has helped augment his security team to better assess and mature the overall security program. Additional security improvements include:

• Mean time to contain (MTTC) of 15 minutes
• Incident response expertise
• Greater overall organizational security maturity
• Implementing best practices on policies and procedures
• Quality and responsiveness of SOC and customer success teams

“eSentire’s team fills several gaps within our organization. [They’re] experts on the technology, so we know we're getting the most value from the technology we deployed from a security perspective. They also give us best practices within the industry on various aspects of policies and procedures, and how we should approach things to secure it in our infrastructure.”

Learn more about eSentire’s Managed Detection and Response, book a meeting with us today.