What are the Benefits Of  A Managed Security Services Provider 

Technology makes modern-day business possible by increasing efficiency and generating useful insights through data. Your networks house your information and make it possible to get more work done than ever before. As one of your most valuable assets, your network deserves the utmost care and attention when it comes to upkeep.

Many businesses assume that the only option for network management is to delegate it to the in-house IT team, but that's far from the truth. Managed IT and technology services provide expert support and service for your network, so you can focus on what your business does best. The business benefits of managed services in combination with the money you can save make it a smart solution for companies of any size.

Managed IT service is when a company outsources certain IT functions to a third-party provider, referred to as a Managed Service Provider or MSP. These outsourced functions may be as basic as keeping IT equipment and other services functional all the way up to full IT team outsourcing. 

The goal is to either serve as an IT team for a company that has little or no internal capabilities or to support an experienced IT team by taking some of the day-to-day tasks off their plate. 

MSSP lowers costs in many areas

Can managed services cut down cost? The answer is yes. It can also make your IT expenses more predictable. With managed services, your costs are neatly packaged into a set amount paid on an annual or monthly basis. An in-house IT team, on the other hand, comes with many more frequent and unexpected expenses that can quickly drain your budget.

Networks come with a lot of equipment that needs to be maintained and sometimes repaired or replaced. MSPs provide maintenance as well as repairs as part of the contract, so a fix that might cost you thousands of dollars out of pocket is absorbed by the provider. This model shields your budget from extreme fluctuation, improving the stability of your business overall.

Small businesses benefit immensely from managed services because the up-front cost to start is so much lower. When a business starts from scratch, the initial costs of hiring and training a team while simultaneously paying for the servers and other equipment necessary can be financially overwhelming.

• • Reduced training costs

• • Working with an MSSP results in major cost savings on training and ensures IT teams have up-to-date knowledge of cybersecurity 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 professionals. In addition, MSSPs continuously monitor security systems - 24 hours a day, seven 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 an MSSP, you save directly on the costs of your own hardware, applications, and experts.

No unexpected costs

An MSSP is a solution to a lot of your concerns, and it makes it clear what you have to do as an organization. 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.

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 optimizations, business roadmaps, and more.

Access to unique expertise and tools

Are your IT staff experts in cybersecurity? 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 organizations, experienced and dedicated staff for IT security are not only expensive but also difficult to find. 

Gaining access to the best cybersecurity solutions and technologies is a key asset and incentive to start working with a Managed Security Services Provider. 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 good MSSPs are always aware of developments in the industry and in modern cyber threats.

Organizations that place their trust in an MSSP are often more effective at protecting their own organizations 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.

Direct cybersecurity

IT teams themselves often don't have time to keep up to date with the best next-generation firewalls 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 organization chooses a good MSSP, that expertise is immediately accessible: your MSSP is dedicated to ensuring the security of your network, endpoints, and data 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is intelligent, always-on cybersecurity expertise!

Automatic detection and fixing of vulnerabilities

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

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. 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. 

Many cyber-security solutions cause integration problems when exchanging data, resulting in inefficient and ineffective data silos. MSSPs usually have integrated technology 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 the technology of all types and sizes that in-house specialists have integrated over time for businesses. The MSSP, 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 cybersecurity.

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. 

The price tag associated with maintaining an in-house IT team is a big one, and that's why you often see teams that are understaffed, overworked and unable to get everything done due to a lack of time and resources. That doesn't work on a daily basis, and it definitely doesn't fly when your company is trying to expand.

Training even one additional employee for your IT department costs thousands of dollars, and there is never a guarantee that they'll even stay with the company. An MSP absorbs the cost of training, and you'll never have to worry about your IT experts jumping ship.

Scaling networks takes significant coordination, manpower and new equipment. It's a huge cost for any company, and it often takes an IT team's focus off other important functions like security. Managed services can help you expand or upgrade systems when you need to, without having to hire and train employees you won't necessarily need later on.

Good guarantees and fast response times

Good 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 organization to a specialized third-party, the MSSP.

Risk Of Cyberattack Is Growing.

Has your organization 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 cyber attacks do to organizations ranges from unauthorized 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 organization. Prevention is better than cure, but if it does happen, it's important to act quickly and limit the consequences.

Affected By A Cyber Incident?

If something does go wrong and your organization 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 organization's unexpectedly high vulnerability to cyberattacks.

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

Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs) 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 organizations are partnering with a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP), 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 organizations. 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 organization. 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 organization 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.

Most Common Types of Services

The number and type of services a company needs from an MSP usually depend on the company's internal IT capabilities. However, the most common services companies need support on are:

Data Backup

IT backup services protect and retain your data and allow you to recover data as small as single files or as large as entire databases.

This layer of redundancy provides additional security and accessibility in case of an event. It usually makes sense to outsource secure data back-ups to take advantage of the state-of-the-art technology an MSP can offer. 

Help Desk Solutions

Many companies who use managed IT services have little or no IT resources of their own. MSPs often offer help desk solutions as a way to give their customers access to an on-call IT specialist who can help them troubleshoot their issues either remotely or on-site. 

IT Support Services

IT support services are really useful when you need a combination of IT support and guidance. The MSP is responsible for proactively managing and patching your devices while providing insight into how your system works and how it should work. 

Managed Network Security

Cybercriminals will steal an estimated steal 33 billion records in 2023

This service helps free up your IT resources by outsourcing tasks like network intrusion detection and prevention, virus and spam eradication, content filtering and traffic analysis through a traditional or next-generation firewall.

Microsoft Office365

With so many companies adopting this extremely popular cloud service, many MSPs are able to plan, design, implement and support Office365 for their customers.

Object Storage

This type of data storage architecture allows a customer to store large amounts of unstructured data. As businesses struggle to find ways to store massive amounts of data, object storage can offer benefits like cost-effectiveness, scalability and reliability. This type of storage is typically used for data like media files, web content, documents and backups. 

Storage

General data storage comes in several tiers. The provider generally works with the customer to find and use the type of storage that will give them the optimal efficiency and the lowest cost. 

Systems Management

This type of outsourced IT allows your MSP to monitor your servers, applications and network. They'll interpret the data and real-time metrics in order to proactively identify and solve issues before they cause downtime and impact your business.  

Virtual CIO

Small and medium companies don't typically have the capacity to hire a dedicated Chief Information Officer. A Virtual CIO is a service some MSPs offer that provides analysis, strategy and a step-by-step plan for the company's technology.