Every Minute Counts: The Case for Proactive Monitoring

You’re not imagining it. There has been a rapid rise in suspicious emails, login attempts, and unauthorised access alerts that were once rare, with recent data suggesting that one hacking incident occurs every minute.

It’s being felt across the Fifosys client base as well. We’re detecting and intercepting higher volumes of attempted attacks than at any point in the past three years.

Attackers are testing everything: inbox rules, admin changes, credential reuse, and the subtle social-engineering traps that slip through even the best filters. And, while that’s not necessarily new news or cutting edge, the difference now is scale and speed. These campaigns move fast, often across time zones and platforms, blending into legitimate activity until it’s too late to notice.

Depending on the level of protection, by the time it’s picked up, the damage caused could be catastrophic, because when a breach occurs, every second matters.

The Five-Hour Problem

Let’s say for a second, you’re an organisation with 70 staff, and a moderate level of security in place - but you’ve not got a proactive monitoring solution implemented. One of your staff members then clicks on a malicious email and is subsequently breached.

By the time it comes to light, on a good day, the reactive investigation and remediation cycle can take our team at least five hours. That’s the time between an alert being raised, verified, and acted on, even in mature IT environments with defined response plans.

In those five hours - and however long the attackers have been inside undetected and unattended - they could’ve forwarded or deleted mail, raised false invoices (or redirected outstanding ones), created new rules to hide their presence, or pivoted into connected systems like Teams or SharePoint. They could’ve also harvested personal data and sold it on the dark web, or have left a back door to return to your network at a later point.

What this all means is that by the time the breach is fully contained, and we’ve followed our 16-point email breach response plan, the clean-up may include financial reconciliation, data recovery, and regulatory reporting.

So, what is five hours of work for an IT team or MSP becomes a week of disruption for those breached.

That’s the gap proactive monitoring closes.

What Proactive Monitoring Really Means

Proactive monitoring flips the model.

Instead of relying on users or administrators to spot anomalies, it continuously analyses live data streams across platforms like Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, and Google Workspace, and flags any deviation from normal behaviour.

At Fifosys, this capability is powered by Barracuda Managed XDR Cloud Security. It connects directly to a client’s environment through secure API integrations and draws from multiple telemetry sources.
The system identifies patterns that indicate risk, including impossible logins, brute-force attempts, privilege escalation, mailbox rule manipulation, or unusual administrative activity.

Each event is then enriched with contextual data and reviewed by Barracuda’s 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC). This layered human validation removes false positives, ensuring that the alerts reaching our internal SOC team are genuine.

In tandem with this, Barracuda’s Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) technology performs instant containment where needed, terminating sessions, disabling credentials, or isolating affected mailboxes.

The result is a reduction in response time from hours to minutes.

From Alert to Action

When an incident is detected under proactive monitoring, our engineers receive a fully validated alert that includes the activity, risk score, and recommended steps.

We will then either contact the person impacted immediately or our point of contact (depending on the client's preferences), confirm legitimacy, and act before the compromise spreads. That early interception often prevents the need for full breach remediation altogether.

Clients with Barracuda’s Managed XDR Cloud Security tell us how they notice the difference, too. They experience less downtime because intervention begins before the disruption is visible, and the outcome is calmer, faster, and far more predictable security management.

If they couple that with some form of dedicated email monitoring, they’ll also see fewer user reports of strange emails landing in their inbox, as those messages are quarantined before delivery.

Visibility Builds Confidence

One of the biggest advantages of proactive monitoring is visibility.

Instead of separate systems and logs for each platform, which overlap and need to be unpicked to understand something, we see a unified view of threat activity across cloud services. With this context, it helps us understand how a single credential reuse attempt in Azure can correlate with a phishing test in Microsoft 365 or a privilege change in AWS.

That joined-up intelligence works much harder than just detecting incidents; it strengthens prevention, shows where an organisation is resilient and, perhaps most crucially, highlights where it still needs attention.

Security That Learns

Each incident handled through Managed XDR contributes to a broader data model. Machine learning and user behaviour analytics refine detection rules and eliminate noise over time.

The longer proactive monitoring runs, the smarter and more accurate it becomes.

For our clients, that translates to reduced false positives and faster action on genuine threats. For our engineers, it means spending less time sifting through routine alerts, trawling logs to find an entry point and more time focusing on strategic defence.

Readiness, Not Reaction

Think of proactive monitoring as more like a mindset shift. It transforms security from an aftershock response to an active, ongoing process of detection, validation, and prevention.

It gives business leaders confidence that their cloud environments are being watched every minute, every day.

Threats evolve constantly. Your defences should evolve faster.

About Fifosys

Fifosys delivers expert-led IT and cybersecurity services to help organisations stay secure, compliant, and resilient.
From cloud strategy and infrastructure support to incident response and proactive monitoring, we combine advanced technology with hands-on expertise.

Talk to our cybersecurity team to learn how continuous monitoring can protect your business.