Depth without giving up control
Security work has two parts that compete for the same people. One is steady: patching, hardening, reviewing access and checking backups. The other is urgent: responding when something looks wrong, often at night. A small IT team can do either well. Doing both, every day and every night, takes more people than most mid-sized companies can justify hiring.
Co-managed cybersecurity adds that depth without taking the security program away from your team. You keep ownership of policy and risk decisions. We run the monitoring, triage and much of the routine work, in tools your staff can log into.
What's included
- 24/7 monitoring and response: endpoint detection and response (EDR) alerts, Microsoft 365 and Entra ID sign-in alerts, and firewall and server logs feed a SIEM that is watched around the clock. Analysts triage and investigate, and contain threats using the playbook you approve, such as isolating a laptop or disabling a compromised account.
- Vulnerability management: scheduled scans of servers, endpoints and internet-facing systems, with findings ranked by real-world risk, not just severity score. We check findings against CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog so the ones attackers are using go first.
- Patching: operating system and third-party application updates on a schedule your team sets, with pilot groups and clear reporting on what's still missing.
- Identity and email hardening: MFA coverage, conditional access, separate admin accounts, and email authentication with SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- Backup verification: regular restore tests, because a backup nobody has restored is a guess.
- Security awareness: phishing simulations and short training, with results your team can act on.
Playbooks agreed in advance
The hardest part of co-managed security isn't detection. It's deciding who can act, and how fast. Before monitoring goes live, we write playbooks with your team for the most likely events: a compromised mailbox, malware on a laptop, suspicious admin activity, ransomware behavior on a server. Each one says what our analysts can do right away, what needs your approval and who gets called at what hour.
| Activity | Your IT team | Sentry Cloud IT |
|---|---|---|
| Security policy and risk acceptance | R, A | C |
| 24/7 alert triage and investigation | I | R |
| Isolating an endpoint during an active threat | A (pre-approved in playbook), I right after | R |
| Disabling a compromised account | A (pre-approved in playbook) | R |
| Vulnerability scanning and reporting | I | R |
| Patch approval and maintenance windows | A | R |
| Incident communication to leadership, insurer or counsel | R, A | C (timeline and evidence) |
| Cyber insurance questionnaires | A | C (answers and evidence) |
Visibility, not a black box
Some security providers keep their consoles to themselves and send a monthly PDF. That leaves your team unable to answer basic questions from leadership or an insurer. In a co-managed setup, your staff get access to the EDR console, the SIEM dashboards and the vulnerability reports. They can see every alert we worked and what we did about it. If you ever change providers, your configuration documentation and incident history go with you.
Working with what you have
If you already own an EDR product, a firewall with good logging or a SIEM, we start there. We'll tell you plainly if a tool has gaps that matter, and what replacing it would involve, but we don't require a rip-and-replace to start monitoring. Where you have nothing in place, we provide the tooling as part of the monthly agreement.
Questions about co-managed security
We already have an EDR product. Do we have to switch?
Usually not. If it gives us the telemetry and response actions we need, we monitor it as is. If something important is missing, such as the ability to isolate a device remotely, we'll explain the gap and the options.
We have a security person on staff. Is this still useful?
Yes. One security person can't watch alerts 24 hours a day or take every vacation without a gap. We cover the monitoring and routine work so they can focus on architecture, policy and the projects that need their judgment.
