MSSPs are always looking for ways to deliver increased value to clients while optimizing efficiency, and this year is no exception. Digital transformation, remote work, and industry shutdowns are just some of the challenges impacting MSSPs and their customers. As you plan next year’s budget, it’s a good idea to assess current operational successes and opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness for both you and your end-user customers. Here are some practical recommendations to increase cybersecurity effectiveness and help you optimize finite budgets and time.
1. Simplify Your Tech Stack
Recent security breaches and ransomware attacks have led to a proliferation in point products that can add complexity and cost. Organizations have an average of 75 security tools, and “tool bloat” requires more experts to hire, train, and operate the technology. As an MSSP, you can minimize cyber sprawl to enhance security and operational efficiency. According to Ponemon Institute’s “Cost of a Data Breach 2020” report, security system complexity was the top item of 25 that increased data breach costs.
While there’s no silver bullet or single vendor covering the entire threat chain, streamlining your technical infrastructure saves time and money. First, evaluate whether your organization has unused or even unsanctioned applications that create risk and can be jettisoned. Second, look for cybersecurity solutions that improve attack surface coverage and address the broadest vulnerabilities and risks, all while tailoring solutions to each customer’s security posture. Finally, consider integrated solutions like Netsurion’s managed threat protection platform that offers defense-in-depth with single-pane-of-glass visibility and a predict, prevent, detect, and respond approach to advanced threats.
2. Augment Your Staff with SOC-as-a-Service
The global shortage of over 3 million security professionals has created a cybersecurity staffing crisis. Almost 60% of organizations state that the staffing shortage impacts their risk posture. If you could hire a cybersecurity expert, retaining them over time becomes an even more significant challenge as larger enterprises woo staff away. SOC-as-a-Service offers an affordable and flexible approach to enhance your existing staff and technical skills and scale up and down instantly.
With SOC-as-a-Service, you receive the Security Operations Center (SOC) “function” in a SaaS model along with cybersecurity experts, comprehensive technologies like SIEM and Endpoint Protection, and managed services like vulnerability assessments and network flow scanning. Experts find that an in-house SOC requires 7-9 months to implement, involves 7-10 professionals for 24/7/365 coverage, and can cost $500K+/year. On the other hand, SOC-as-a-Service accelerates your security maturity without CAPEX and the challenge of hiring and retaining technical experts. You can ramp up quickly to address new markets or client opportunities with SOC-as-a-Service (SOCaaS) that scales with you.
3. Cloud-Deployed Security Controls Without Hardware
Managed threat protection platforms can include SaaS-based cloud deployment options. With no hardware to purchase or maintain, cloud-based security controls reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) with a pay-as-you-grow model. The platform is already implemented, provisioned, tested, and often paired with a managed service that speeds up onboarding and time-to-value. SaaS solutions make Work-from-Home (WFH) easy with its anytime, from anywhere access. In addition, a centralized cloud console lets you focus on expanding your MSSP business and not on managing hardware. Also, log storage in the cloud scales with your customers to simplifying meeting compliance requirements. To deter today’s financially motivated threat actors, it’s crucial to protect sensitive data with comprehensive visibility across endpoints, mobile devices, and cloud.
Next Steps
Security complexity is increasing in the face of exploding cyber threats. But there are ways to streamline IT operations and spend for you and your end customers, all without sacrificing compliance, data security, and customer engagement:
- Adopt integrated defense-in-depth solutions to predict, prevent, detect, and respond to threats; and reduce the devices and tools you need to manage
- Minimize false positives and empower your existing IT team with SOC-as-a-Service
- Protect cloud data and SaaS solutions without hardware to buy and sustain
Staying competitive and profitable in this challenging environment requires a unified blend of people, processes, and technology. Whether you are implementing a SOC for the first time or augmenting to add weekend and after-hours coverage, 24/7 cybersecurity analysts in a managed service work as an extension of your in-house team. Learn more about SOC-as-a-Service and our managed threat protection platform, EventTracker.
Blog courtesy of Netsurion, which offers the EventTracker security platform. Read more Netsurion guest blogs here.
