Three Reasons To Consider Managed Security Services

1. Deliver on speed to value

If you ask an information security professional if cyber attackers are smarter than they are – the answer is no.  But if you ask the question about if they can they move faster – the answer is absolutely yes.  When an organisation needs to improve its security posture with a new technology, the evaluation, procurement, implementation and testing process adds considerable time before it is able to action change. Meanwhile, an attacker can quickly use any new attack vectors increasingly cheaply. They are not constrained by corporate processes making them vastly more agile and adaptable.

In an interview with Forrester, the manager of a newly built security operations centre confessed that it would take 18 months for their significant in-house investment to deliver any value to the business. This is typical and these delays can frustrate even the most focused and mature security operations teams – let alone senior stakeholders that have approved the investment.

Speed to value is just one of the reasons why an increasing number of UK organisations of all sizes are exploring Managed Security Services (MSS).  MSS is a sure way to decrease the time to value of any cyber investment.  Organisations struggling to resource specific cyber initiatives can have new capabilities such as proactive and protective monitoring, security incident management and capable threat detection. These capabilities can help to combat threats and achieve commercial or government compliance levels. They offer contextual cyber intelligence that gives direction to investment priorities and risk management decisions.

2. Trusted cyber intelligence

Cyber intelligence – the ability to get ahead of attackers and respond in real-time to incidents is a capability that many organisations do not have the infrastructure, skills or resources to provide today.  Selecting and making sense of the right external threat feeds, aggregating and correlating security event log data, putting this data in context for your business and recommending the right actions not only requires a specific skill set but to be effective needs a brutal 24/7/365 focus.

Many organisations seek a MSS partner that will work as part of their team to minimise risk, maintain availability and drive efficiency across their IT infrastructure.  It’s important that the MSS providers they partner with invest in building knowledge and have relevant accreditations, so that customers have access to these skills without having to worry about how they find, maintain or retain them. As an MSS provider we pride ourselves on maintaining the Relevant Cyber Security accreditations that allow us to work across all manner of organisations, including the following; CLAS (CCP), Cloud Security Principles (Public Sector Network), PCI DSS, ISO27001, CHECK, Cyber Essentials Plus, GICSP and CISSP.

3. Continuous compliance – no longer a pipe dream

Whatever type or size of business you are, preparing and executing the growing number of industry or partner compliance standards and audits is arduous and time consuming –competing for resources with other business as usual tasks and projects. If organisations could not only eliminate this ad hoc resource drain but increase the confidence of partners, auditors and stakeholders and reduce the capital cost of continuous compliance –  they would be eager to find out how.

As a Managed Security Service provider, we can offer a continuous compliance monitoring service and link with industry regulators to offer best practice guidance and practical advice for customers.  Help is provided to establish a compliance base line and agree the best way to monitor, manage and respond to event information in a specific compliance context.

These services not only maintain compliance standards – increasing confidence for businesses – but also provide empirical information which elevates the discussion around risk and future security priorities to board level.