SecOps Cloud Platform Guide for Builders

The SecOps Cloud Platform delivers foundational, well-understood security technologies as capabilities: as open, cloud-native primitives instead of black-box tools. Here's how builders can use this fact to create better products and service offerings:

• Clarify your differentiators. In a crowded marketplace where buyers are already wary of tool sprawl, it's difficult to stand out—and challenging to convince buyers to take on another vendor. To succeed, startups must demonstrate clear value and differentiate themselves. Determine what sets you apart, and where you can deliver the greatest value to customers. This is where your internal engineering resources should be focused.

• Offload infrastructure work. The SecOps Cloud Platform offers the kinds of mature cybersecurity capabilities that teams used to have to develop themselves or purchase as part of a product. This includes things like: Deploying endpoint capabilities via a multiplatform agent, alerting and correlating logs from any source, automating real-time analysis and response regardless of the environment, routing telemetry data to any destination, performing historical threat hunts, isolating endpoints from a network remotely, and many more.

  In short, cybersecurity builders no longer need to "reinvent the wheel" in order to get to market. Here again, the clear analogy is to the IT public cloud. Most software developers today wouldn't invest in physical servers or develop complex, in-house solutions to handle application deployment and scaling. They would simply leverage cloud-based services like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions and run their applications without ever worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

  Similarly, by using the infrastructure capabilities of the SCP, cybersecurity builders can spend their time and resources on their core value proposition—thereby reducing maintenance and integration challenges, eliminating external dependencies, and avoiding the risk that comes from building on someone else's product.

• Work with SCP engineers to develop custom integrations. The SecOps Cloud Platform is a vendor-neutral provider of tooling and infrastructure for the cybersecurity industry. It is not a potential competitor.

  As you develop on the SCP, reach out to LimaCharlie engineers for support in creating customized integrations, advice on best practices for a configurations or deployments, or feature requests that you’d like to see in the development roadmap.

  The SCP's public cloud business model means that the platform succeeds when its users succeed, so someone will always be on hand to help.

By building on a public cloud for cybersecurity, startups can focus on what they do best without having to develop and maintain DIY solutions—and without putting their business in the hands of a traditional vendor.

The SecOps Cloud Platform has a transparent, pay-per-use pricing model and delivers all capabilities on demand. In addition, the platform offers a number of valuable free resources. This helps builders to cut costs and reduce initial investment in several ways:

• Conduct research and develop a prototype for free. The SCP gives all users access to a fully featured free tier that includes two sensors. There is thus zero up-front cost to begin researching the platform, testing your idea, or even developing a prototype. Start by seeing if the SCP is the right choice for your project. Then, save money on early-stage development work once you begin.

• Build without lock-in. The SCP's pricing model means you only pay for what you need, for as long as you use it. You don't have to deal with mandatory minimums, long-term contracts, complex licensing, or termination fees. This enables you to create on the platform secure in the knowledge that you are not committed to a given level of spending before your growth justifies it—and that you aren’t locked into your infrastructure provider.

• Use available SCP resources to save money. Building on the SCP also offers several direct and indirect ways to lower costs during development.

  The SecOps Cloud Platform is designed to be as user-friendly and easy to master as possible. In addition, the SCP is supported by extensive documentation, an active community forum of users, and a learning library full of tutorials and walkthroughs. This means developers will spend less time learning a new technology—and more time building.

  In addition, you can make use of more direct forms of assistance. Users can reach out to SCP engineers at any time for help. Qualified builders can also apply for a $1000 platform credit through the platform's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Grant Program.

  Leverage these resources to reduce your development costs and ensure that your engineers are spending their time on tasks that add the most value.

• Meet compliance needs with free storage. All telemetry data brought into the SCP is stored for the cost of ingestion for one full year. If your project has data retention or compliance needs, leverage the SCP's default storage capability to help keep your data storage costs down.

• Take advantage of discounted pricing. If you've decided to build with the SCP for the foreseeable future—or if your product or service has started to see significant uptake—use discounted pricing options to save money as you grow. The SecOps Cloud Platform provides volume-based discounts to help you improve your savings as usage increases, as well as annual or multi-year discounts for those ready to commit to longer-term platform usage.

The SCP gives cybersecurity builders many of the competitive advantages the IT public cloud offers to startups in other verticals—and a high degree of direct assistance and support as well.

The SecOps Cloud Platform enables scalable cybersecurity operations. Here's how developers can benefit from building on such a platform:

• Future-proof your infrastructure. Cybersecurity startups often turn to open-source or custom-built infrastructure to save money and stay independent. But while this approach may work early on, its limitations become apparent over time.

  It's possible to build performant and successful cybersecurity projects on open-source or DIY technologies. However, many businesses that take this route experience difficulties when they grow. The complexity, integration challenges, and troubleshooting work that are manageable with a small user base can quickly become untenable at scale.

  Before basing a part of your project on a custom or open-source solution, consider the challenges you will encounter later on if you are successful. You may be better served by using the SCP for that aspect of your offering.

• Build on a scalable platform. The SecOps Cloud Platform is designed to help organizations scale their security operations. Basic assumptions of the platform include things like multitenancy, flexibility, open APIs, and rich automation capabilities.

  Builders should plan to scale from the outset—leveraging the SCP's engineering-centric approach to support future growth by developing architectures, integrations, and workflows that will enable scaling without limits.

  Any successful cybersecurity business will encounter challenges as it attempts to increase its customer support or its development work. However, building on an engineering-centric platform enables startups to plan for the future from day one—and makes growth easier and more trouble-free.

• Scale with your revenue. A major problem for early-stage cybersecurity startups is that they must spend money on fixed infrastructure costs without having enough users for that to be profitable. If funding runs out before a product–market fit is found, the business fails.

  The SecOps Cloud Platform offers an alternative route. Leverage the SCP's pay-per-use pricing to scale your infrastructure spending with your revenue. Even if you start off with a small customer base, you won't be losing money on infrastructure costs. Conserve your resources and allocate your spending to development, marketing, and sales efforts instead.

The SCP offers builders a firm foundation for success. It provides a platform that is built to scale—and its pay-as-you-go pricing helps startups extend their runway and grow gradually and safely.

LimaCharlie's SecOps Cloud Platform is intended to create a new paradigm for modern security operations and a better future for the cybersecurity industry.

LimaCharlie is 100% committed to its platform users and technology partners—and as such, extensive support is available to anyone building with the SCP:

• The SCP community Slack channel provides a forum to talk to other platform users and to get help from the LimaCharlie team.
• The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Grant program offers a $1000 credit to help qualified businesses and individuals develop any project they want with the SecOps Cloud Platform.
• The SCP's rich documentation, LC 101 video series, and on-demand webinar series help new users get started with the platform quickly.
• Above all, LimaCharlie development, support, and engineering teams are always available to answer questions about your project, talk about a potential use case, discuss a feature request, or help in any way possible.