There is no such thing as complete protection against illness or accidents. That’s why it’s important to have companies like Ottobock: The global company develops and produces prostheses, orthoses, exoskeletons and wheelchairs. Its portfolio also includes the Mollii Suit, a fundamental innovation in the treatment of neurological disorders and the associated complaints. Ottobock also maintains patient care centers where they adapt the products to patients and train them in their use. It takes a lot of practice and numerous adjustments for a user to become accustomed to handling the prosthesis, for example. The “Human Empowerment Company”, as Ottobock sees itself, was founded in Berlin in 1919 - when the need for medical supplies was greater than ever. Today, more than 9,000 employees work in branches all over the world. The success of Ottobock’s work is also reflected in its turnover of around 1.5 billion euros in 2023. However, this success is not only based on products that are used following an accident or illness. By entering the exoskeleton market, Ottobock has also been offering its customers preventive measures for some time in order to prevent illness-related absences due to excessive or incorrect strain.
In line with business development and associated acquisitions in recent years, the complexity of the company’s application landscape and IT infrastructure has also grown significantly. The integration of new systems and endpoints is a continuous process, as IT is widely ramified and uniform standards are only gradually being introduced. For a long time, cybersecurity was also dominated by a large number of isolated individual solutions such as various antivirus products. Ottobock has successfully countered this with consolidation - today, the Microsoft technology stack is the basis for an integrated platform that is used across the board.
“Trust and reliability have the highest priority in our collaboration with partners, customers and our users. It’s equally important to handle the data provided to us with care. For us, this also means mastering the constantly increasing threats in the cyber environment and becoming resilient,” emphasizes Henning Christiansen, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Ottobock.
In order to achieve the necessary transparency regarding the processes in the IT landscape and the ability to react, the right security software is required, such as Microsoft Defender as an EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) solution and Microsoft Sentinel as a SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platform, as well as the appropriate cybersecurity personnel, ideally in the form of a Security Operations Center (SOC). “Setting up our own SOC was indeed on our agenda,” reports Christiansen, adding: “But for a global company of our size, we would have needed at least ten experts to cover all tasks. Hiring so many cyber experts is a challenge in times of skills shortage and doesn’t make sense from a financial perspective.” Doing without a SOC was out of the question - Ottobock’s digitalization was already too far advanced for that and the dependency of the business processes on functional IT was too great. In addition, Ottobock had already been the target of hacker attacks. In order to deal with the escalating threat situation in cyberspace in general, Ottobock decided to expand the limited capacity of its own IT security team with an external SOC in the form of an MXDR (Managed Detection and Response) service.
Transparency is the key
One element played a key role in the evaluation process: the Microsoft technology stack as the platform foundation. As Ottobock had already switched to Microsoft Defender and Sentinel as its SIEM platform before actively searching for an MXDR provider, the right security partner logically had to have a great deal of expertise in dealing with this software. “We needed an additional IT service provider that could offer a comprehensive SOC with round-the-clock monitoring. Therefore, after a detailed selection process and several test setups, we finally opted for Ontinue and its MXDR service, ION,” explains Nico Lange, Senior Cybersecurity Solutions Architect at Ottobock.
Henning Christiansen and his team quickly realized that Ontinue was the right partner for setting up a Security Operations Center. Ontinue’s Cyber Defenders and Cyber Advisors know the Microsoft technologies used at Ottobock inside out thanks to their many years of experience. Ontinue is also able to provide Ottobock’s internal IT security team with a holistic and in-depth insight into all security-relevant processes within its systems.
“Transparency is and remains the key to a secure IT environment,” Lange states. “If you don’t know what’s going on in your own ecosystem, it’s difficult to react to threats. The pressure to maintain an overview has never been as great as it is today: the question is no longer whether the next attack will occur, but when.”
Proactive instead of reactive
Thanks to the collaboration with Ontinue, Henning Christiansen now has a solid foundation for persuading the subsidiaries about the advantages of IT consolidation. In day-to-day business, security incidents are still forwarded to Ottobock’s IT security experts, but they are categorized in such a way that they can focus on what is important. In concrete figures, this means that Ontinue only forwards one out of over one million events to its customers. “If we then have to intervene, we receive extensively enriched incident reports from the Cyber Defenders and Cyber Advisors. In conjunction with the playbooks provided by Ontinue, which contain recommendations for action for a number of security incidents, we notice a significant increase in efficiency when investigating attacks,” says Christiansen. “We find assurance in knowing that we have a complete, seamlessly integrated Security Operations Center at work - that is extremely valuable.”
In most cases, communication takes place via the joint Microsoft Teams channel. Only in particularly sensitive situations do the specialists from Ontinue also call Henning Christiansen and his team to ensure that a critical incident is not inadvertently overlooked. “A close and trusting collaboration with our MXDR service provider holds significant importance to us,” says the CISO. “That’s why we also share many of our internal developments with them, so that our IT environment feels as familiar as possible to Ontinue’s Cyber Advisors and Cyber Defenders. This is particularly important for times when we are not available ourselves.” At the same time, Ottobock’s experts learn through close collaboration how they can strengthen the protection of their systems, reduce the attack surface and further improve their behavior in the event of a cyberattack. “A particular advantage of Ontinue is that our central contacts do not change. You don’t get that from other MXDR service providers in this form, where there is often rotation,” adds Lange.
In the future, Ottobock plans to focus intensively on new cybersecurity solutions. In order to stay up to date, artificial intelligence is naturally on the agenda. As the company’s IT security team is very lean, the use of this future technology is mandatory. “First and foremost, we want to develop something meaningful and understandable from the myriad of data. Speed and efficiency are becoming even more decisive factors in detecting and averting threats than before. On the one hand, Ontinue’s AI tools will help us to utilize this valuable information profitably, while on the other hand, the appealing and comprehensible presentation of the findings will also help us to transport the topic of cybersecurity from the nerd level to the management level and translate it accordingly,” says CISO Henning Christiansen. “Fortunately, we have exactly the right partner on our side: just as we help our users, Ontinue helps us to live (cyber)resiliently.”
