Managed Security – The Expanded Frontier for MSPs
The cybersecurity landscape today reflects over 1,200 vendors across the 17 major categories, often with overlapping value propositions addressing very specific aspects of a broad and dynamic threat landscape. Navigating this requires tremendous effort and expertise, something that is often a tall order for most mid-market and smaller enterprise organizations.
Key IT stakeholders in these companies already have a full plate driving a broader digital transformation mandate. Increased compliance obligations and dynamic threat vectors make security a non-negotiable obligation to an already growing list of demands.
The choices facing most organizations can be distilled into three broad categories:
- Do-It-Yourself (DIY): Evaluate, assemble, integrate and manage the right set of vendors across key security domains including identity management, monitoring, managed detection and response (MDR), business email protection, data protection ; beyond the vendor selection, investing in improving correlation to reduce false positives and building the necessary expertise on the remediation front becomes equally key.
- Engage Security Experts: Engage a managed security services provider (MSSP) that brings in the tools and expertise to assist with threat monitoring and detection, augmenting existing capabilities and processes; organizations still need to bring the necessary expertise around remediation, or coordinate this activity with the managed service provider (MSP) responsible for the underlying IT infrastructure.
- Leverage ‘One-stop’ Service Provider: Engage a MSP that can both manage their hybrid cloud infrastructure and bring in the necessary security expertise, thereby collapsing the value propositions of MSP and MSSP into one; this also provides the added advantage of compressing the incident lifecycle across detection, response, and remediation by having all of these activities be performed under one-roof.
The ‘one-stop’ service provider model has the potential of solving the most pressing challenges faced by most organizations including:
- Acute talent shortage: By any estimate, there is a significant gap in cybersecurity professionals, with most at-scale MSPs investing heavily in grooming talent from other areas with structured programs and academic partnerships.
- Expanding attack surface: Cloud security adoption is driving increased IT and data fragmentation, complicating the job of securing these assets; further the boundaries of the traditional office are increasingly dissipating, making identity as the largest attack surface; improving the overall organizational risk posture requires a multi-dimensional effort across a broad set of domains.
- Dynamic landscape: The threat landscape is evolving quickly, and the attackers are often a step ahead in the race; keeping abreast requires significant commitment and allocation of time outside of the day-to-day operational activities that most organizations are not equipped to sustain.
- High cost: Managing multiple vendors, integrating data feeds from a multitude of sources, processing a high volume of alerts with a high degree of false positives, and managing the talent lifecycle introduce explicit cost and inefficiency, not to mention a high level of alert fatigue.
As a leading multi-cloud MSP, Navisite recognizes this opportunity and made extensive investments in expanding its security management services, both via industry partnerships with a curated set of threat detection platforms, and in-house security expertise to remediate threats real-time, thereby bringing a continuous security improvement mindset with defined outcomes.
Click here to learn more about the cloud security solutions and compliance services Navisite offers to help your organization improve its data security posture.