Ensure end-to-end protection of your critical assets with Managed Security Services

The threat landscape is constantly changing, and as these changes quickly occur, so do your security challenges. Once upon a time, organizations were limited to managed security services that were strictly involved with firewalls, anti-virus software, and VPNs. However, the demand for more intuitive and proactive security tactics have increased significantly due to the sharp escalation in sophisticated threat actors creating new attack techniques that easily defeat legacy strategies.

With that being said, many organizations still struggle to keep up with the old tried and tested techniques – phishing scams, business email compromise, just to name a few. According to the Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, most of these attacks are happening to organizations that are unprepared for potential threats. Of these data breach victims, 58% of those effected were small and medium sized businesses.

Many of these organizations don’t have the expert staff to complete necessary proactive security solutions in-house, nor the budget to hire security professionals. To combat these challenges and ensure a strong ROI, they are turning to managed service providers (MSP) to help minimize business risk. MSPs offer a wide variety of preventative and detective solutions to secure your data and IT infrastructure. Some of these services include managed firewall, content filtering, anti-virus, security monitoring, incident response, vulnerability scans, SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), intrusion detection and much more.

When you are considering using an MSP for managed security services, you might need to weigh the economic benefits of outsourcing these functions. Here are three in-house costs to consider when making the ROI case for managed security services:

Staff and 24/7/365 Coverage

Do you have the budget to hire and train security professionals? The average US base salary for an IT security administrator is $80,000, according to salary.com; and that’s without taxes, benefits, and training. However, that is only one piece of the puzzle. You also have to consider what hours you require security coverage. Most organizations need multiple administrators to have 24/7/365 coverage. If you decide that you don’t need total coverage, what will you do if a security event happens in the middle of the night?

An MSP has trained professionals on staff 24/7/365 that are continually monitoring and managing your environment for security events. If an event occurs, they instantly work to eliminate the threat before compromise occurs – no matter what time of the day. Sometimes, just being able to save on internal staffing costs is the biggest reason to justify moving to an MSP.

Security Infrastructure

There are so many different types of security tools on the market and they all have different functionality. It is paramount that you are using tools that are up-to-date, have deep integrations, and have wide functionality. Within budget, you may not always get the product with the right capabilities for your organization. A key advantage to working with an MSP is that they are already utilizing the most innovative security tools on the market. Additionally, they have already invested in SOC (security operations center) environments, alleviating the need for customers to make investments in a data center or monitoring facility.

Compliance Regulations

There are mandatory compliance regulations for all industries and many organizations struggle to know what rules they need to be following. MSPs are reliable, responsive and cost-effective assets to deploy that can improve certain controls required for compliance mandates. They are required to stay current on mandates internally and, because of this, they have a strong knowledge on the proper data security policies, framework, and reporting. They know exactly what responses to take in the event of an attack, and can supply activity logs, reporting, and audit logs to ensure you are always compliant.

With an MSP, like Magna5, you have access to certified engineers, market and industry experience, responsive customer service, and robust security expertise. Some of these qualities are just simply unattainable when it comes to in-house security functions. As IT budgets continue to be under pressure and companies need to maximize the value of all their investments, an MSP can help you achieve a strong ROI for your managed security services.