Security

Article by ATI partner Craig D’Abreo from Masergy

Do you need a survival guide to find the right Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP)? Forrester Research and Masergy have joined forces to help you navigate the world of outsourced security.

When firewalls materialized in the 1990s, protecting your network was easier, and outsourcing cybersecurity to a service provider wasn’t necessary. Today, however, it’s a very different story. Defending your network from sophisticated attackers requires a laundry list of services and technologies that must correlate data from multiple devices and sources. When you factor compliance requirements and government regulations with a rapidly growing list of security incidents and seemingly never-ending alerts to monitor and distill down to a short list of high-priority actions, it’s easy to become deluged by the responsibilities. Security has become an untenable situation for most IT teams, stretching personnel resources and budgets to the max.

To survive, enterprises need outside partners with solutions that ingest data from a wide variety of sources, leveraging machine learning and behavior analytics to discern what’s normal and what should sound the alarms. A must-have for any enterprise is a 24/7 dedicated team of internal resources in place to monitor and manage alerts and incident response. Building such a team often stretches internal IT resources even further, and requires a large budget to cover:

• Staffing
• Facilities
• Equipment/tools
• Training
• Compliance
  
  

The security market has become so saturated that it’s difficult to navigate the plethora of products and services in order to make a smart decision about who and what should be trusted to protect your most important asset–your company data. However, choosing an MSSP can also be daunting, because the selection process is about more than just the features of a given cybersecurity product or solution. It’s a contract to deliver services over a number of years, and once selected, you’re committed to learn to work with your MSSP.

When selecting new technologies and services, questions that are often asked are:

• What should I be looking for in a managed security service provider?
• Are there industry gold standards that set the best of the best apart from the mediocre MSSPs?
• What questions should I ask potential MSSPs before placing my organization’s well-being in their hands?
• How does a Security Operations Center (SOC) work? What does the escalation process look like? What will be required of my team?
• And finally, what data will need to be exchanged on a regular basis, and how is that data secured?
  
  

We find these questions are best answered by the experts. That’s why Masergy has partnered with Forrester Research, to provide you with a survival guide that will assist in your search for the right MSSP. Forrester Research’s Principal Analyst Jeff Pollard and Masergy’s V.P. of Security, Craig D’Abreo have joined forces to help enterprises chart a course for more informed cybersecurity decision making. During the June 13, 2018 webinar, The MSSP Survival Guide, they will discuss the tips you need to know and the traps you need to avoid as you map out a comparison strategy to identify the best partner for your needs.

Article by ATI partner Craig D’Abreo from Masergy

Learn more about Managed Security.