How and Why You Should Work with an MSSP
Security breaches have increased 68% since 2020, and the average cost of a breach is now $4.24 million—the highest in 17 years. The increase in ransomware, especially, is concerning for organizations of all sizes. In 2020, it’s estimated that there were 65,000 successful ransomware attacks—that’s one every eight minutes. Additionally, the average time to identify and contain a data breach was 287 days.
Throwing more resources (both human and money) isn’t always the best approach to outsmart cybercriminals; instead, working with a managed security service provider (MSSP) could be your best solution for securing your organization’s defenses. In this article, we’ll highlight what an MSSP is and the benefits of working with one to elevate your security posture. Plus, at the end of this article, we offer a free eBook that gives you the tools and tips you need to select and work with the right MSSP for your business.
What is an MSSP?
A managed security service provider (MSSP) specializes in monitoring and managing security devices and systems to protect your organization from cyberattacks. MSSPs offer a coordinated, multi-layered, multi-faceted approach to security, which is difficult to do on
your own. An MSSP shifts cybersecurity risks from your organization to a third-party that specializes in addressing cybersecurity challenges.
Technologies MSSPs use include firewall, intrusion detection, security information and event management (SIEM), vulnerability scanning and endpoint protection services such as anti-virus and endpoint detection and response (EDR).
What are the benefits of working with an MSSP?
Access to experienced cybersecurity professionals
One of an MSSPs’ biggest advantages is the fact that it employs a team of cybersecurity experts so you don’t need to. It eliminates the need for you to find, hire, train and manage security staff, deal with turnover and more.
Multiple sources of threat intelligence
Actionable alerts and trained security experts
In general, there are too many alerts and false positives for any human to realistically review them all. Forty-three percent (43%) of organizations experience false positive alerts in more than 20% of cases, while 15% report more than half of their security alerts are false positives.
An MSSP’s trained security experts use their vast experience to sift through alerts to prioritize the most important ones. The MSSP will also use specialized, integrated software that’s designed to filter out false positives and highlight those that deserve further investigation. This type of software is expensive to build and requires in-depth expertise to use effectively.
Taken together, an MSSP’s human expertise plus specialized software means you’ll rarely be sent an alert that’s redundant or unusable.
24x7x365 managed support services and scalability
It’s a daunting task to build your own team of cybersecurity experts who can monitor your organization’s security posture around the clock. An MSSP can easily do this with coverage across all time zones. Additionally, if you need to scale your cybersecurity resources up or down, an MSSP can do that quickly.
Fast incident response time
An MSSP has the capabilities and resources to speed up the response process. The longer threat actors go without being stopped, the more damage they cause. For every incident, an MSSP can provide an incident commander who can pull in resources with different areas of expertise to provide immediate, prioritized and coordinated support. This is the best approach to achieve long-term containment and mitigation.
Support level agreements (SLAs) spell out specifically what an MSSP will do for you and guarantee you’ll receive a specific level of support. In general, the average time to respond after detections should be about five minutes.
Uses multiple sources of threat intelligence
To thwart attacks, you need to know what is happening throughout your business. And you need to have multiple sources of threat intelligence powered by enough expertise to know what to do with the data. An MSSP has an experienced security team that specializes in threat intelligence and leverages data from multiple sources, correlates it and enriches the data. This enables the MSSP to be proactive and escalate incidents to your organization in a predetermined process to keep you safe from threats.
Leveraging multiple sources of threat intelligence helps an MSSP provide the best information possible to you by:
- Understanding which threat actors want to attack you and the tactics they use
- Removing false positives
- Enabling a more effective response
- Permitting analysts to weigh and score the threat and make sure it is actionable information
- Enriching and fine-tuning alerts
An MSSP will monitor traffic as it passes through its infrastructure, examine syslogs and perform API analysis for near real-time, customized alerting. These capabilities provide actionable intelligence to help defend networks and systems that are communicating with malicious actors.
Interested in learning more? You can download The Complete Guide to Finding and Working with a Managed Security Service Provider here.
The post How and Why You Should Work with an MSSP appeared first on Nuspire.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Nuspire authored by Team Nuspire. Read the original post at: https://www.nuspire.com/blog/how-and-why-you-should-work-with-an-mssp/
