What Are Managed Security Services (MSS)? 5 Things To Know
Managed security services or MSS is a systematic approach to managing your business’s security needs. It can be conducted either in-house or be outsourced to a specialized company like 1-800 Office Solutions. Managed security services usually define outsourced security services and have quickly become the norm for businesses of any type or size, so today, we will analyze a bit what MSS are and how they can benefit your business.
Which Things Fall Under MSS?
- Managed Security Monitoring – day-to-day monitoring and interpretation of important system events throughout the network like malicious hacks, attacks, anomalies, trend analysis, etc.
- Assessments for External, Internal, and Vulnerability Threats –MSS uses technology and people to sweep for any kind of vulnerability that may pose a risk to your environment. External scans require a deep, one-time analysis that is followed up by the best ways to establish and maintain cybersecurity. Internal scans are done on a regular basis and will provide recommendations on safeguards. Utilizing these two, the MSSP will conduct a vulnerability assessment as well.
- Cyber Incident Response – Investigating and resolving malicious activity throughout your network.
- Consulting – Consulting services that assess business risks and develop security policies and processes.
- Perimeter management of the client network –This means installing, upgrading, managing, and monitoring the hardware, software, firewall VPN, and such.
- Email Security Awareness – this is simply a combination of human intelligence and technology by raising awareness about cyber-attacks.
What Are The Five Things You Need To Know About Managed Security Services?
They Help Minimize Costs While Maximizing Efficiency
MSS offers a team of professional and seasoned security experts that will work with you for far less than it would cost to hire such a team yourself and have them in-house. Building a full-stack security technology team is very costly for many reasons, some of which include:
- Vulnerability & Configuration Management: which costs $70-$105K salary per employee, plus the cost of hardware and software licensing;
- Penetration Testing: roughly costs $70-$105K plus additional hardware and software licensing;
- Security Engineering: $70-$110K;
- Audit & Compliance: $90-$120K plus the licensing you will have to acquire for the software;
- Management: $100-150K.
The estimates above are yearly costs per one employee in each field. So if you choose to hire in-house, then the costs would be $475,000 up to as much as $695,000, without benefits. Payroll will definitely double if you choose to create a department that runs 24/7. The bill is already soaring, and we haven’t even talked about facilities, training and re-training, and so on.
All in all, companies like 1-800 Office Solutions are a more reasonable (and fairly cheaper) alternative.
They Will Help You Extend The Team
A global Managed security service provider will offer you a great advantage. Using services like these will help you become better positioned for your business operations while in a weird way extending your team by incorporating the dedicated experts you pay a small fee for. Bigger MSSP’s have 24/7 365 days per year Security Operation Centers offer you the latest threat intelligence and preventive measures that smaller ones cannot provide.
You Get Rapid Incident Response & Event Investigation
An MSSP offers these types of services that are truly unmatched experience in handling enterprise security incidents. This, in turn, will prevent further harm to your business, ranging from single-system compromises to enterprise-wide intrusions by larger and more advanced bad faith actors’ groups. Their rapid incident response team will quickly assess any challenge you might face and recommend actions to be undertaken while using digital forensics and their own personal experience for handling and solving every possible crisis.
Automating Your Vulnerability Management
Continuous vulnerability scans of your environment are a crucial element to a successful security posture. A benefit of working with companies like these is that they provide accurate internal and external scans across their clients’ IT network assets, hosts, web applications & databases. Automated vulnerability scans like these will reduce a company’s resource needs through a structured distributed deployment while reducing costs from IT operations.
MSSP’s also offer configuration change, vulnerabilities, patches, hardening, and policy compliance of IT assets, applications with interactive dashboards, and informative reports. By having experts deploy these automated vulnerability scans, you will ensure your results are actionable, reliable, meaning without false positives.
You Will Obtain Best In Class Intelligence
Only the best will offer you real-time threat intelligence technology that will identify advanced malware attacks, malicious attacks, and persistent threats. A highly qualified managed security service company will use a threat R&D laboratory in multiple countries worldwide to perform deep and continuous research on advanced threat types. They do this on their own accord and for the sole purpose of expertly handling such threats in the future for their clients. The benefit of a partner like this is that they will literally invest millions of their own dollars a year to detect and analyze global threats using threat intelligence inside a real intel-lab.
Conclusion
Outsourcing can be beneficial as it will give your company round the clock monitoring and intrusion management, updates and/or patch management, regular security audits, etc. In the short run, this will negate the need to perform chores like this yourself, and in the long run, it will save you time, money, and employee stress while adding value to your business.
I hope I’ve given you a basic glimpse of the managed security services world and made it a little clearer as to what these types of businesses do. There are many reasons to choose the outsourcing route, and if it’s what you want, I would suggest going with 1-800 Office Solutions. We have the knowledge and expertise to handle even the biggest of tasks, so don’t hesitate to contact us and get in touch with one of our experts by clicking here.
