This global manufacturer's technology is responsible for powering high-volume production lines, treatment facilities, and distribution systems that can't afford downtime. The company's environment spans thousands of IT and OT assets, dozens of plants, and a fast-moving cloud footprint. The manufacturer's challenge isn't a lack of tools, it's fragmentation.
A rigid MSSP model slowed investigations, created inconsistent alerts, and limited visibility across IT and OT. At the same time, leadership mandated a rapid move to Microsoft E5, stretching the security team beyond its capacity. They needed a partner who understood both the technical complexity and what was at stake.
The company's challenges weren't isolated to one tool, team, or domain. IT, OT, security operations, identity, and engineering all needed to move in lockstep. As pressures mounted, the security team faced a perfect storm that made one thing clear: they needed a more capable partner.
The CIO set a clear mandate: consolidate SIEM, endpoint protection, data governance, and long-term security strategy within the Microsoft security ecosystem.
The timeline was aggressive, and the risk was real. Any disruption to SOC detections, OT monitoring, or operational stability could ripple across global manufacturing operations. This wasn’t a migration the internal team could take on alone without putting continuity at risk.
The incumbent provider depended on proprietary tools and rigid workflows that couldn’t keep pace with the customer’s expanding Microsoft environment. Integrations with the existing stack were brittle and inconsistent, leading to:
For a global organization with always-on operations, this was not just inefficient. It was dangerous.
OT leaders had valid concerns. Their environments rely on aging equipment, specialized control systems, and production lines that can’t tolerate even brief interruptions. The previous MSSP never proved it could operate safely in OT environments, which deepened skepticism. Plant engineers worried that:
The result was a real barrier. OT teams didn’t trust security to make changes without putting operations at risk.
Much of the client’s detection logic, correlation rules, and workflows had been built years earlier by analysts and engineers who were no longer in those roles. What remained was a fragile patchwork of:
This tribal knowledge created two serious risks. A migration, especially to Microsoft, could easily break critical detections if anything was missed. And no single team had a complete picture of how the environment truly worked. This hidden complexity made leadership uneasy and turned an already difficult migration into a high-stakes challenge.
After evaluating global consultancies, regional integrators, and established MSSPs, the client chose Cyderes for one clear reason: we aligned directly with their most critical operational risks.
The biggest concern was that a move to Microsoft E5 could break detections, disrupt OT monitoring, or erase years of undocumented knowledge.
Cyderes addressed this head on by:
Other providers promised a clean transition. Cyderes showed exactly how it would work. That transparency resonated with both security leadership and the teams running day-to-day operations.
OT was one of the biggest obstacles. Years of experience with vendors who did not understand industrial environments had made the OT teams cautious and skeptical. Cyderes demonstrated:
They had experience monitoring aging, sensitive OT systems
They could integrate visibility without firmware changes or downtime
This was the turning point for several plant leads who had initially resisted any changes driven by security.
The client had accumulated a wide mix of tools from the incumbent MSSP, regional teams, and legacy programs. SIEM, EDR, OT monitoring, logging pipelines, and cloud telemetry were all sourced from different vendors and operated differently across sites. Several providers in the evaluation underestimated how intertwined these tools were or treated the Microsoft migration as if it could be layered on top without addressing the underlying complexity.
Cyderes demonstrated something different:
They understood how each tool contributed to the current detection and visibility model
They could identify which tools should be retired, integrated, or replaced first
They laid out a step-by-step migration path that reduced risk instead of amplifying it
They showed how to consolidate overlapping tools into Microsoft without losing context
What stood out to the client was not just technical capability. It was Cyderes’ ability to make sense of a distributed, inconsistent tool ecosystem and turn it into a coherent plan that respected operational realities. For a global environment dealing with years of accumulated complexity, that clarity was a major differentiator.
During the evaluation, every stakeholder, from SOC analysts and identity engineers to OT leads, architects, and security leadership, saw the same thing: Cyderes operated as one team.
There were no handoffs between silos or stitched-together services. Instead, Cyderes delivered a coordinated approach across SOC operations, identity, OT, architecture and engineering, Microsoft integrations, Exposure Management, and client success. That unified model stood in sharp contrast to the incumbent MSSP and other providers that showed strength in isolated areas but couldn’t deliver end-to-end execution.
The impact of partnering with Cyderes showed up quickly and across multiple layers of the organization. What mattered most to the client was not just technical success, but operational stability and clarity in an environment that had become increasingly difficult to manage.
Sentinel, Defender, and Purview became the backbone of the client’s security operations. Because Cyderes preserved existing logic and respected operational constraints, analysts were able to transition without losing visibility or signal fidelity.
Noise dropped. Prioritization stabilized. Analysts no longer spent hours reconciling conflicting alerts from multiple tools. Escalations flowed through a single, understandable model that worked the same way across regions, plants, and cloud workloads.
Redundant platforms were retired. Overlapping capabilities were consolidated into Microsoft. The SOC gained a cleaner picture of what tools were in use, what they contributed, and who owned them.
OT teams who had been skeptical became advocates once they saw that visibility could be expanded without impacting operations. Both sides had access to the same threat picture for the first time, which improved communication and reduced friction.
The client gained a foundation that supports AI-driven threats, regulatory change, and continued cloud expansion. Instead of reacting to tool limitations and vendor dependencies, they now operate from a unified and adaptable model. The company began expanding the relationship into additional Cyderes services before the renewal cycle even approached. That was the strongest indicator of trust: they continued investing because they saw the difference in their day-to-day operations.
This client’s journey shows what can happen when a complex enterprise finds a partner who understands the technical, operational, and organizational realities of its environment. Cyderes helped stabilize a fragmented landscape, unify security under a modern Microsoft ecosystem, and build a foundation that supports both current and future challenges.
For leaders evaluating their own path forward, this case study serves as a reminder that the right partner doesn’t just deploy technology. They help you protect the business without slowing it down.