Security Managed services

8 major benefits of having a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP)

9 min. read
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Risk of cyberattack is growing

Has your organisation ever had to deal with ransomware, malware, virus infections, or cyberattacks? This attack may have seen important services fail and meant employees couldn’t do their work for hours or even days. It could even have blocked customers from accessing your digital or physical services. There’s a good chance this has already happened to you, given that the number of reports of cyber incidents has never been as high as it was last year.

The damage cyberattacks do to organisations ranges from unauthorised access via a relatively simple hack to large-scale theft of sensitive data, resulting in prolonged downtime. Effective recovery costs a lot of money and damages the confidence of your customers and investors. Whatever happens, don’t let a cyber incident destroy your organisation. Prevention is better than cure, but if it does happen, it’s important to act quickly and limit the consequences.

The challenge for companies

As an organisation, you must always be able to count on having structurally secure access to all customer data and business-sensitive data, while at the same time respecting all market-related regulations, legislation, and company policy. Reducing costs also often plays a major role, especially at a time when IT teams need to do more than ever in terms of innovation, security, and optimisation. That is the number-one challenge that CTOs, CIOs, and IT managers face today.

Affected by a cyber incident?

If something does go wrong and your organisation falls victim to a cyber incident, the often already overloaded IT staff work overtime to get the affected services and security back up and running as quickly as possible. These sorts of situations can be a frightening wake-up call, suddenly making everyone aware of the organisation’s unexpectedly high vulnerability to cyberattacks.

This is when people start asking: how can we better secure our organisation, employees, and customers against cyberattacks? And what’s the most cost-effective solution?

Managed Security Services Providers provide structural security solutions against cyberattacks, including always up-to-date expertise in the latest cyber threats and appropriate solutions.

What is a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP)?

Because security threats are becoming increasingly common, many organisations are partnering with a Managed Security Services Provider, often in addition to their existing security program. MSSPs provide professional monitoring and management, protecting hardware and data from potential cyberattacks.

A Managed Security Service Provider is a third party that manages and implements network security and other forms of security for organisations. This could include:

  • Blocking viruses and spam
  • Managed Firewalls
  • Detecting intrusion attempts
  • Setting up and securing a virtual private network (VPN)
  • Implementing system changes or upgrades

In addition, MSSPs continuously monitor the security devices and systems in the organisation. Most MSSPs offer a wide range of services, including:

  • Device management
  • Log monitoring and management
  • Vulnerability management
  • Consultancy services

Managed Security Service Providers generally offer their services in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This means that your organisation doesn’t need any extra hardware or staff – and this has a number of major benefits! We’ve listed the eight main ones for you.

Eight major benefits of having an MSSP

  1. Lower costs in many areas
  2. More time to focus on your business
  3. Access to unique expertise and tools
  4. Direct cyber security
  5. Automatic detection and fixing of vulnerabilities
  6. Increased action-oriented insight and reduced alert fatigue
  7. Scalability
  8. Good guarantees and fast response times

1. MSSP lowers costs in many areas

  • Reduced training costs
    Working with a Managed Security Services Provider results in major cost savings on training and ensures IT teams have up-to-date knowledge of cyber security and threats. You benefit directly from the expertise and experience of the MSSP.
  • Lower staffing costs
    You also save on staffing costs. Using an MSSP means you don’t incur any costs for hiring one or more full-time InfoSec professionals. In addition, Managed Security Services Providers continuously monitor security systems – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! You can’t even expect that from your best employees.
  • Lower investment costs
    An MSSP spreads the fixed costs of investments in technology over a broad customer base. And as a customer, you benefit directly from these savings. With a Managed Security Services Provider, you save directly on the costs of your own hardware, applications, and experts.
  • No unexpected costs
    An MSSP is the solution to a lot of your concerns, and it makes it clear what you have to do as an organisation. After all, managing everything in-house means new rules and guidelines can come as a surprise, resulting in high unexpected costs when you need to hire industry and compliance experts.

2. More time to focus on your business

An MSSP frees uptime, so you can work on the things that really move your business forward – no more continuously having to resolve incidents. Your IT teams can reclaim time to focus on developing things, such as new services (innovation), network-related optimisations, business roadmaps, and more.

3. Access to unique expertise and tools

Are your IT staff experts in cyber security? Do they know all the latest developments, techniques, and technologies that guarantee safety? IT security is a unique expertise area that requires continuous training and education. For many organisations, experienced and dedicated staff for IT security are not only expensive, but also difficult to find.

Gaining access to the best cyber security solutions and technologies is a key asset and incentive to start working with Managed Security Services Providers. An MSSP also provides independent cyber-security advice; this isn’t the case for suppliers of hardware and tools.

One of the main benefits of working with a Managed Security Services Provider is the broad cyber-security expertise it offers, something that many companies don’t have in-house. Outsourcing this to a Managed Security Service Provider means you can be certain that a security expert will protect and manage your data properly. The certified employees of MSSPs are always aware of developments in the industry and in modern cyber threats.

Organisations that place their trust in an MSSP are often more effective at protecting their own organisations than when they rely on their own security teams alone. Of course, this doesn’t alter the fact that both teams have to make proper arrangements about how they communicate with one another.

4. Direct cyber security

IT teams themselves often don’t have time to keep up to date with the best NGFWs or cyber-security topics, such as endpoint protection, phishing, and advanced threat prevention.

The good news is that as a partner of your company, an MSSP always has that knowledge at hand and applies it directly. From the moment an organisation chooses a Managed Security Services Provider, that expertise is immediately accessible: your MSSP is dedicated to ensuring the security of your network, endpoints, and data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is intelligent, always-on cyber security expertise!

5. Automatic detection and fixing of vulnerabilities

An MSSP takes a lot of work off your hands when it comes to detecting and fixing vulnerabilities. They can:

  • structurally detect and reduce vulnerabilities in critical systems.
  • proactively predict threats, especially and specifically for targeted cyberattacks.
  • automatically detect important offensive tactics and methods in critical systems.
  • respond effectively and quickly.
  • reduce the likelihood of an attack succeeding and becoming an ‘event’ that takes a lot of time to control.

6. Increase action-oriented insight and reduce alert fatigue

Day in, day out, IT professionals have to deal with countless security alerts originating from various security tools used within the company. Research by the Cloud Security Alliance shows that more than 31% of IT security specialists do not respond to these alerts, as most of them are false positives.

In short, alerts often fail in their purpose: they’re either not usable or don’t contain information that could be used to take action. This form of alert fatigue increases the likelihood that actual cyber threats will go unnoticed.

‘Over 31% of IT security specialists don’t respond to security alerts, due to the high number of false positives.’
The Cloud Security Alliance

Many cyber-security solutions cause integration problems when exchanging data, resulting in inefficient and ineffective data silos. MSSPs usually have integrated technical solutions that fully focus on action-oriented alerts.

So if your MSSP sends you alerts, these are hardly ever redundant or unusable.

Most MSSPs use technology of all types and sizes that in-house specialists have integrated over time for businesses. They, therefore, offers solutions that avoid situations where IT staff receive endless alerts, while at the same time increasing response efficiency. Moreover, thanks to the insights provided by an MSSP, you can set easily measurable goals for cyber security.

7. Scalability

Another benefit is that MSSPs can be scaled perfectly to your needs, and the required security IT infrastructure can be easily adapted. So if you temporarily need extra capacity, you simply scale up. Resources automatically grow with your capacity needs. And if you need to scale back at a later time, you can. MSSPs respond quickly.

8. Good guarantees and fast response times

MSSPs offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) alongside their 24-hour, 7-days-a-week, 365-days-a-year support An SLA contains guidelines for customers on incident response times and guarantees in the event of security incidents.

In short, all potential risks associated with cyber threats are shifted from your organisation to a specialised third-party, the MSSP.

Conclusion

Cybercrime is evolving at an incredible pace, with even the largest international companies discovering vulnerable points in their security systems. Without proper protection, tracking these threats would take an awful lot of time and energy, not to mention manpower and salaries for qualified in-house IT specialists.

Today’s threat landscape poses a real risk to your sensitive data, profitability, and reputation. IT security is an ongoing activity that requires a clear understanding of how users, customers, and applications access data and how devices are configured. An MSSP is the solution and also provides regular cyber security assessments.

Cost savings

It’s often the cost that prevents a company from hiring MSSPs. But that’s a misconception. Hiring these providers usually saves your organisation a lot of money:

  • Reducing costs after a cyber-security incident.
  • Fewer costs for hiring in-house experts and further training staff.
  • 24-hour protection prevents intrusion and avoids costs.
  • No high investment costs.
  • Good prior insight into costs.

The insight an MSSP gives into cost savings is crucial.

An MSSP for your organisation

Cyber security should support rather than hinder innovation and change. Manageable, flexible, resilient, and responsive protection gives your organisation what it needs.

Nomios has specialised in assessing, building, and managing enterprise information security for over 10 years. Our extensive engineering experience gives us an opportunity to develop security strategies and solutions that respond to your evolving business challenges. Nomios’ security solutions enable you to do secure digital business. The security service that our team offers amongst others is managed detection and response.

Our expert security team helps you limit the risk from modern-day threats. Nomios is a trusted partner of IT organisations of any size and in any industry.

If you want to know more about what we can do for your organisation, our experienced engineers and certified experts can make the difference. So contact us today by calling or leaving a message. Our team is ready to help you.

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