Five Cybersecurity Challenges an MSSP Can Address

When an organization has an internal security team, there may be some hesitancy to bring on a managed security services provider (MSSP) because of the assumption that it means the organization is giving up control. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, MSSPs enable in-house security professionals to become more productive and strategic, allowing them the time they need to focus on the initiatives that better leverage their expertise. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest security challenges facing organizations today, and how an MSSP can address those challenges in a more cost-effective way.

Challenge: Tight budgets

Owning, managing and maintaining security systems in-house is often cost-prohibitive for businesses. From the capital expenses for purchasing the hardware and software to licensing and maintenance expenses, it’s hard for most businesses to justify doing everything in-house, especially at a time when security budgets are tightening.

How an MSSP helps

This is where an MSSP can prove vital. MSSPs are built to offer the security expertise and 24x7x365 monitoring and incident response that’s often elusive to most businesses – whether it be the financial burden or lack of talent (or if we’re being honest, it’s usually both). MSSPs specialize in threat intelligence and provide an always-on approach to cybersecurity, which is necessary given the rapidly evolving threat landscape.

Challenge: Compliance/Regulatory

Today’s more complex cybersecurity environment requires businesses to not only be hyper-aware of their security posture and protocols, but also ensure compliance with a variety of different frameworks and standards.

This can be a tall order for most businesses, especially when you think about all the different policy, regulatory and legal security standards that exist now – AND the fact that these change on a regular basis. Compliance with standards like HIPAA, PCI and GDPR, while necessary and important, can create a lot of headaches if your team isn’t well-versed in the requirements. Not to mention how time-consuming it can be.

How an MSSP helps

It’s table stakes for an MSSP to be up to speed on all the latest frameworks and standards. They can help you conduct a risk analysis, choose a framework, set controls, set up policies, update as needed and continue monitoring.

Challenge: Staffing

The Great Resignation has been felt across all industries since the start of the pandemic, but the cybersecurity industry has been feeling the pinch for much longer. The struggle to find skilled cybersecurity professionals who can keep up with an ever-evolving security landscape has only increased. In fact, the (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study  indicates that the global cybersecurity talent deficit is around 4 million people.

How an MSSP helps

An MSSP acts as an extension of your team, doing all the blocking and tackling you need to ensure you’re meeting your business’s security needs. They provide proactive monitoring, detecting, hunting and mitigating to protect your business. This includes 245x7x365 SOC monitoring, which is difficult for most businesses to do, as SOCs need to be run by teams of people to be effective.

Challenge: Lack of in-house expertise

Similar to the previous challenge, when there’s a lack of overall security talent, that also means there’s often a lack of in-house expertise. Many organizations fail to take into account the expertise and time required to manage all of their security needs internally. They’ll try to oversee security operations with a team of IT generalists who lack the skills needed to do the work correctly; on the flip side, they may try to hire security specialists, but often those high-demand roles command salaries beyond what’s feasible for many businesses.

How an MSSP helps

MSSPs provide 24x7x365 access to highly skilled network security experts and offer a consultative experience that engages their clients in meaningful and effective ways. The right MSSP will offer a customized security roadmap for your business based on your unique needs, and can keep you apprised of the latest threat intelligence, technology and analytics to stay ahead of the bad guys.

Challenge: Alert fatigue

False positives continue to plague security teams, especially as we see alert volumes grow. And when alert fatigue sets in, security teams’ guards are down, making it an ideal time for threat actors to strike. Speed is everything in the security space, and time spent chasing down false positives can create apathy that can be catastrophic when a real alert is ignored.

How an MSSP helps

An MSSP can help you bypass the “noise” and identify what is actionable versus what is not. Through technologies and services like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), managed detection and response (MDR), endpoint detection and response (EDR), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms and more, MSSPs can gather data from multiple sources, correlate it and enrich it with other insights and findings. By combining the right amount of human intelligence and automation, an MSSP can ensure the alerts received by their client’s internal security team are the ones they should review.

Ready to start looking at an MSSP to support your security needs? Download the questions to ask when evaluating an MSSP in our handy MSSP evaluation checklist.

At Nuspire, our mission is to make clients fanatically happy through a relentless pursuit of excellence. Let’s talk about how we can work together to provide a new, fresh and inspiring approach to closing cybersecurity gaps.