10 Reasons You Need a Managed Security Service

Managed services play a big role for SMBs today. The market for managed IT is enormous, and will likely continue on an upwards trajectory. Aside from modern solutions that businesses need to implement in order to remain competitive, cybersecurity has become a top priority for organizations to address.

Managed security service providers help businesses protect their networks from attacks and minimize the potential for breaches.

Today, we’re going to look at 10 reasons SMBs are hiring MSSPs and the benefits a provider can bring to your business.

1. Assess Vulnerabilities

MSSPs will begin their relationship with a business by performing a professional audit of the organization’s existing security. For all the dangers of cyberattacks that affect SMBs, an estimated 66% of decision makers don’t consider cyber threats to be a concern.

An MSSP will evaluate a business through interviews and scanning tools, determining what vulnerabilities exist within internal and public-facing networks. Once identified, recommendations will be made and a plan will be drawn up to address security concerns.

After steps have been taken to ensure vulnerabilities have been fixed, follow-up checks and scans can be implemented into the cybersecurity strategy to protect the network moving forward.

2. Minimize Costs

Cybersecurity staff are not cheap. Hiring an entire team of experts to manage your organization’s security can set you back a significant sum. With going salaries for cybersecurity jobs often well over $100K, it’s easy to see how hiring a whole team can hit your bottom line hard.

With an MSSP, you’re still getting a team of experts dedicated to each specialized role, but you don’t have to pay their full salary to have them in-house. This provides a huge opportunity for SMBs that want to up the capabilities of their security team but simply don’t have the means to fully-staff an in-house team.

3. Maximize Efficiency

When you use a managed service, you’re maximizing your bang for your buck. In-house teams are smaller than managed service counterparts and lack the breadth of experience that an MSSP can afford.

This can lead to an in-house team that is left putting out fires when it should be able to focus on other tasks. By delegating cybersecurity to an MSSP, you can alleviate overwhelmed internal IT staff and make use of the extensive resources (staff and advanced solutions) that your partner has.

4. Expand Your IT Team’s Capabilities

Using a managed service provider for your security can give you access to much large roster of experts and specialists at your disposal. It also gives you access to the MSSP as a whole. MSSPs that are properly certified and have a good reputation are an enormous asset to any SMB serious about its cybersecurity.

A quality MSSP will have a demonstrated history of providing managed services to clients. By bringing one on-board, you’re adding a wealth of knowledge and a proven track record to your organization’s IT team.

In addition, many MSSPs will have best practices which have been honed over time and applied to your business, something that is difficult to achieve by bringing together a team of individuals for an in-house team.

5. Proactively Counter Threats

A managed security service will offer you advanced monitoring and protection for your business’s network. The process that many SMBs will be familiar with is the break/fix model—an incident occurs, someone is called out to fix it, and the business is sent the bill. This is a reactive model of operation and is prefaced on something going wrong before it can be corrected.

With the frequency of cyberattacks on SMBs increasing, the costs of being a victim are simply too big to risk operating a break/fix program for cybersecurity—many businesses fold after suffering a cyberattack.

Hiring an MSSP means you are taking control by being proactive in protecting your network from cyberattacks. Advanced solutions catch threats before they have a chance of causing disruption and round-the-clock monitoring means your defense never rests.

6. Fast Response

MSSPs operate their services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This effectively means that if there’s an issue, it will be discovered instantly and responded to rapidly. Conversely, handling security in-house requires huge investment, manpower, and technologies in order to respond with the same speed.

One of the major benefits of partnering with a service provider is their ability to deal with cybersecurity issues as urgently as possible. An incident response team will take care of the problem, then it will be assessed, and actionable recommendations can be made to lessen the chances of any further complications in future.

7. Advanced Technology

When a business partners with an MSSP, they don’t just get access to their staff, they also get access to best-in-class technology. At Impact Networking, for example, we vetted hundreds of tools in order to provide the best possible solutions for our clients.

This runs counter to the “security-in-a-box” approach, where a provider partners with a single vendor and only uses their tools. A quality MSSP with high standards will use the most comprehensive tools available in order to keep up with evolving threats that develop quickly in the cybersecurity space.

8. Focus on Business

Given the scope and complexity of cybersecurity, in-house IT teams can often spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with security issues rather than being able to focus on their traditional remits as security tasks are pushed down to them. Given the frequency and severity of cyberattacks, it is extremely difficult for organizations to keep pace.

With the cybersecurity landscape changing so much, it can be hard for IT personnel to keep up. Using an MSSP can allow your partner to take care of the complex task of mitigating cyber threats while you can focus your energy on business objectives.

9. Risk Management & Compliance

Data regulations are becoming increasingly common place, and with businesses processing more data than ever before, it’s imperative that SMBs understand what they have to comply with. Around half of all SMBs are unaware of what GDPR is, and with CCPA set to take effect Jan 1, 2020, compliance is a major consideration.

An MSSP can offer you expert advice on how to meet compliance regulations and how to ensure that sensitive data is properly stored and protected so as to mitigate regulation breaches as comprehensively as possible.

10. Save Your Business From Disaster

Major breaches are often catastrophic for small and mid-sized businesses. Partnering with an MSSP gives an organization the ability to implement a solid disaster recovery and business continuity plan to help the business when an attack occurs.

Aside from the loss of data, downtime is extremely costly, and to add insult to injury, a breach does significant reputational harm to a business. A good MSSP will pull out all the stops in ensuring that your business is well-placed to avoid a breach.

Should the worst happen and there is a breach, the MSSP will have a plan of action to counter and get the business up-and-running as quickly as possible with minimal data loss recovered from frequently cloud servers which frequently back up company data.

For more information on cybersecurity, download our eBook, What Makes a Good Cybersecurity Defense for the Modern SMB?

Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about Impact’s Managed IT Services.