An increasing number of organisations are using third-party providers who offer managed security services, providing cyber security oversight for critical technology systems and data.
These Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) offer security capabilities that resource-constrained organisations don’t have themselves, such as proactive and protective monitoring, security incident management and threat detection.
These capabilities aim to improve your security posture, and help your organisation achieve the appropriate levels of compliance. MSSPs also offer contextual cyber intelligence that informs investment priorities and risk management decisions.
Organisations choose to work with MSSPs for a variety of reasons, and Loop Secure shares the three main reasons below.
- Speed and adaptability
If an organisation needs to improve its security posture, often they will consider buying security tools to run internally. That generally involves evaluating options, procuring the software, implementing and testing it, and ensuring staff are trained appropriately to use it. The lead time before the new security tool is working effectively can be significant - the internal team need to be trained and gain practical experience to ensure their original risk is being addressed. This can take years.
Other security investments can take even longer to mature. For example, building an internal Security Operations Centre can take 2-3 years for the investment to deliver any real value to the business, and even then often never realise a return due to staff turnover.
Both of these scenarios frustrate the organisation’s leaders, who expect a return on that investment, and are often left with their concerns not being addressed, even after significant financial, resource and time investments.
The ability to move and adapt quickly has organisations turning to Managed Security Services (MSS), decreasing the time to value ratio of their cyber security investments. The advantage of MSS is that the providers are able to quickly deliver outcomes based on proven security tools, people and processes – as they have will have been successfully providing these to other clients.
This reduces the gamble of trying to improve your security posture by doing it internally.
- Trusted intelligence
To stay one step ahead of attackers, experienced MSSPs facilitate accurate and effective cyber intelligence, allowing more accurate response to security incidents. Quite often, organisations do not have the infrastructure, skills, resources or time to do this.
MSSP’s have honed their internal processes over many years to leverage intelligent approaches like incident response play-books, more automated orchestration between analysts and existing protective security tools and also integrated threat intelligence.
When looking at threat intelligence, selecting and interpreting the right external threat feeds, gathering and correlating security event log data, putting this data in context for your business and recommending the right actions requires a specific skill set that MSSPs can provide.
In addition, they’re able to do this continuously: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
In this sense, MSSPs work as a close partner of your organisation’s in-house security team to minimise risk, maintain system availability and drive efficiency across your IT infrastructure.
- Maintain compliance
No matter the size of your business, navigating the minefield of industry compliance standards and audits is complicated and continually changing. It also requires attention from your organisation’s resources, pulling them from other projects and activities.
MSSPs can eliminate this resource drain by handling your compliance needs, and increase the confidence of your partners, auditors and customers of your business. Highly experienced MSSPs will also provide your organisation with insight into real threats to your environment, which elevates the discussion around risk and future security priorities at board level.
Contact Loop Secure to find out how our Managed Security Services team can reduce your security risk and help you maintain compliance.
To read a buyers guide to Managed Detection & Response, click below:
