Managed Security Services Benefits

Managed Security Services or outsourced security services are becoming a new reality for businesses of all sizes.

Hiring an MSSP offers more than a few advantages to an organization’s security team. Your team can start to focus on strategic security projects while the MSSP handles the day-to-day monitoring and management of your security environment.

Have a look at these ten managed security services benefits and let us know of any others!

1.Minimize Your Costs & Maximize Efficiency

An MSSP offers you a team of seasoned security experts that will work for you at a fraction of the cost of building your security team in-house. Acquiring a full stack of security technologies and solutions could be a very costly endeavor. Don’t believe us? Consider this quick breakdown of roles for a full team of security specialists:

• Vulnerability and Configuration Management: $70 -105K salary plus hardware/software licensing
• Penetration Testing: $75-105K plus hardware/software licensing
• Security Engineering: $70-110K
• Audit and Compliance: $90-120K plus licensing for software
• Project Management: $70-105K plus software licensing
• Management: $100-150K

For single coverage on each chair, you’re looking at $475,000 to $695,000, plus the costs of benefits.  Add to that the costs of building your own 24×7 SOC and payroll doubles to up to $1.3 million.  Facilities for them adds yet more, and you’re still looking for a security unicorn to bring it all together. Coming in on the low side of payroll estimates will bring you turnover and re-training, costs unto themselves.

MSSPs and security outsourcing becomes a much more reasonable alternative.

2. Extend Your Team

A global MSSP will offer your team a unique advantage. With a global footprint, you will be better positioned for continued operations wherever or whenever you need it through an MSSP’s global 24x7x365 Security Operation Centers (SOCs). These SOCs offer your business the latest threat intelligence and visibility into advanced threats where a smaller or regional provider cannot. Imagine extending your security team to a global security footprint this holiday season.

3. Become a Threat Hunting Organization

An MSSP will offer you advanced monitoring, analysis and investigation of malicious code and callbacks, detecting attempted or successful security breaches. The 24x7x365 Security Operations Centers ensures the best-in-class defense, real-time incident response, and operational optimization. An MSSP uses threat monitoring to go beyond the network to become a threat hunting organization and stop threats before they even hit the network.

4. Rapid Incident Response & Event Investigation

An MSSP that can offer Incident Response and Event Investigation services will offer unmatched experience in handling enterprise security incidents. This prevents further harm to the organization, ranging from single-system compromises to enterprise-wide intrusions by advanced attack groups. An MSSP’s Incident Response team will quickly assess the challenges you face and recommend specific actions using digital forensics and their experience of with literally thousands of hours handling every possible crisis.

5. SIEM & Log Management Insights

An enterprise generates very relevant data about its security posture across multiple locations. When you use an MSSP, you can analyze all the data from a single point of view. This makes it easier to identify trends and patterns that are out of the ordinary. That is the job of a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. An MSSP will use the SIEM system to collect logs and other security-related documentation for analysis on a single platform. They can use this information to correlate your data against a database of threat intelligence feeds and proactively identify any malicious activity.

6. Security Asset Management Relief

Organizations often purchase new IT security solutions only to let them sit on the shelf, in doing so not maximizing the full potential of these security solutions. Another benefit of an MSSP is they will offer the necessary skills and technical resources your team needs to manage and administer these new security assets.

An all-star MSSP will also take a holistic view of your security environment and understand the specific requirements of how to integrate the new security assets with the latest patches, configuration changes, and security policy changes.

7. Closely Monitor Advanced Threats

Small and mid-size enterprise organizations face an increasing complexity and sophistication of cyber threats such as Advanced Persistent Threats, advanced malware (Trojans, viruses, and worms), and other malicious attacks. A benefit of using an MSSP is they can offer sophisticated security technologies and the latest threat intelligence to provide monitoring and detecting against these serious, growing threats. An MSSP that offers Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) will allow you to have an active threat protection program up and running quickly while minimizing costs and maximizing security

8. Automate Your Vulnerability Management

Ongoing vulnerability scans of your environment are a critical element to a successful security posture. A benefit of working with an MSSP is they can provide accurate internal and external scans across your IT network assets, hosts, web applications, and databases. Automated vulnerability scans by an MSSP will reduce the resource needs through a structured distributed deployment, thus reducing costs from IT operations.

In addition, the MSSP can offer configuration changes, patches, vulnerabilities, hardening and policy compliance of IT assets, devices and applications, with interactive dashboards and informative reports, with the deployment of these automated vulnerability scans by certified experts to ensure your results are truly actionable and without false positives.

9. Properly Manage Risk & Compliance

In today’s highly regulated industries, it’s critical that you’re monitoring your compliance level for regulatory purposes across PCI DSS, GLBA, SOX, HIPAA, FISMA, ISO and others.

A highly certified MSSP will offer you the benefit of extending its Risk Management and Compliance expertise and certification to your organization and ensure its assets are protected. Regulatory environments are constantly evolving and combine with rapidly changing security solutions creates a challenging environment for your organization to succeed. A benefit of using an MSSP is having the expertise of their risk management and compliance programs.

10. Obtain Best-In-Class Intelligence

Only the best MSSPs offer real-time threat intelligence technology to identify advanced malware attacks, persistent threats, and malicious attacks. A highly qualified MSSP will use a threat R&D laboratory in multiple countries to perform deep and continuous research on these types of advanced threats.

There are many reasons as you can see why outsourcing your security operations to an MSSP is a more cost-effective, efficient, and better return on investment for the organization in various areas. Let your security personnel focus on strategic security projects while an MSSP focuses on the tactical threat hunting and monitoring capabilities.

Contact Goliath Security Group and talk with our Cyber Advisory team to see how we can help bridge the gap!