An increasing number of organizations are investing their budgets for security into managed security services. A threat landscape that is evolving requires talent that is skilled security plus expertise. However, there is a huge imparity in finding proper talent that is qualified along with the need to manage and monitor security services on a 24X7 basis.
Let’s check how managed security services function along with some key advantages of using the managed security service provider (MSSP).
Understanding Managed Security Services
Managed IT security services include management and monitoring that is outsourced to your security devices and systems. An MSSP would manage your Event Management tools, Security incidents, Intrusion Detection Systems or Intrusion Prevention Systems, anti-virus, firewalls, compliance management, and vulnerability, and more.
Organizations would use MSSPs so that they could offload all the tedious work of managing and monitoring some hundreds if not more of the security events and incidents in a day. In case your organization lacks the in-house security resources, the time, or expertise to monitor also manage your environment of security, in that case, managed security services are a much beneficial option.
Completely Managed vis-à-vis Security Services Co-Managed
There are mainly two kinds of managed security services – co-managed and fully-managed security services
Fully managed – the provider of security services owns the entire security technologies also manages and monitors all the security events that are generated from these technologies and tools. In case your organization is budget conscious or in case you don’t possess internal resources so that you could learn plus manage a range of latest technologies, in such case fully managed security services would rather be a good fit.
Co-managed – In case your organization owns a huge array of security technologies and comes short on the resources required for internal security to manage these solutions day and night, in such a case co-managed services come beneficial. You could eventually bring the management and monitoring of technologies in-house with your organization scaling up and with you building a Security Operations Center (SOC). An MSSP could educate plus inform you about the features of each tool, its functionality, along with setting up the best configuration. Along with it, co-managed services allow that your staff should focus on other strategic projects along with offloading the crucial job to manage and monitor events during non-business times. Hence, there are several MSSPs that offer 24X7 coverage.
Managing Threat and Monitoring
The security landscape of today needs continuous investigation and monitoring of threats. The security data gets collected from a number of resources, where an MSSP could utilize this towards identifying correlations within your security incidents, finally, pinpointing malicious and anomalous activities.
A team with security analysts at any MSSP would evaluate your security data also determine in case these incidents could be turned into alert-based security alerts. In such a case, tickets are all opened, and the notifications are performed based on each escalation profile, which sets a priority also makes notifications accurately, creating an incident response playbook for the business.
A managed security services provider needs to have some security analysts trained so that they can threaten the hunt. A rather common approach for most of the organizations having in-house security teams is simply waiting for the alert. With the help of threat hunting, the security provider would actively look forward to network activity, unusual endpoint actions, and compromise indicators. The analysts within MSSP wouldn’t wait for security incidents or alerts rather look for malicious activities and aberrations.
Event Investigation and Incident Response
A very common approach for most organizations having in-house security teams is simply waiting for an alert. With the threat hunting, the provider of security actively seeks for the network activity, unusual endpoint activity, and compromise indicators. The analysts working at MSSP wouldn’t wait for security incidents or alerts rather proactively check for wrong and malicious activities.
Event Investigation and Incident Response
Once there is the creation of a security alert, the managed security services team would work on the complete remediation of the incident. Your internal team could be overwhelmed with certain other essential tasks of security. By offloading the incident response to a certain provider would allow your organization to speed up handling those incidents that previously required multiple shifts also many days to mend.
Consider the amount of time it would take towards patching software, push out newer audio-visual signatures, investigate every aspect of security events also communicate breach of security to your customers and employees (in case necessary). An IR team of third-tier could contain threats and have the ability to minimize the duration plus impact of any security incident through employing one team where skilled analysts have functioned on several customer environments.
Security Intelligence
They can come from private and open sources and also help one organization to improve its response and detection activities. In case your organization is not able to dedicate a total full-time staff towards gathering full-time staff, then in that case it is beneficial to have managed security services.
One of the leading MSSP could offer threat intelligence to help security technologies enable, monitor, and report to all your organizations. Threat intelligence would provide the security team with the insights that are needed so that you could proactively look for threats. For all small to larger organizations, the advantage of having threat intelligence from that of a managed security services is that it would be based on a huge variety of scenarios throughout the client base, so that it could be analyzed by certain security specialists who are knowledgeable that has the capability to understand how it could impact your organization in the short and long term.
Also, with a complete array comprising of the security technologies plus clients in-house, the provider of managed security services offers all your organizations insights within global threats live. Any managed security services give your business a huge advantage while you defend against threats that come zero-day, newer vulnerabilities, plus ransomware that could readily evade any kind of detection.
