Managing security across all IT systems in your organization has never been simple, but it’s become increasingly difficult in the face of new cyber threats emerging every year. This is why you need managed IT services. Companies can instantly tap into a team of industry experts and achieve greater security assurance at lower costs.
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Here’s Why You Need Managed IT Services in 2023
Managed information technology (IT) services begin with basic tech installation and support and scale to include security and cyberdefense concerns. Working with information security service providers helps organizations navigate the threat landscape and prepare to not just survive risks but thrive in spite of them. The biggest benefits of managed IT and security services include:
- Scalable protections to meet the ever-growing risks of cybercrime
- Cost and resource reduction when compared to internal security
- Robust architecture implementation and cyberthreat mitigation
- Real-time incident response and long-term incident management
- Streamlined management of regulatory compliance requirements
Working with a managed security service provider (MSSP) will help you reap all these benefits, rethinking and optimizing your cyberdefenses to protect you against threats for years to come.
Reason #1: Scalable Protection Against Growing Threats
Cybercriminals are constantly searching for ways to victimize businesses, irrespective of their size, industry, or location. Any new vulnerability will be exploited immediately. Small businesses are most likely to be targeted by cybercrime, but the stakes of a successful attack only grow as a company matures. Taking on more business and data makes you a bigger target for attacks.
You need a managed IT and security partner to help you prepare for and mitigate incidents.
One of Gartner’s most telling predictions for the future of cybersecurity is that a whopping 45% of organizations worldwide will experience supply-chain attacks by 2025. In practice, this means that even well-defended organizations could be impacted by cybercriminals’ attacks on their strategic partners. Preventing these attacks from impacting your own organization takes a concerted effort to account for vulnerabilities beyond the scope of your internal operations.
This highlights the need for flexible protections, including third-party risk management (TPRM).
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Security Program Advisory and C-Suite Oversight
Security and IT management partners will work with your team on all aspects of cyberdefense, including baseline program advisory. Bringing in an external team of experts will give you an unbiased, accurate look at how effective your defenses are and what changes are needed.
At the highest level, MSSPs can also assist with c-suite security functions.
At earlier stages of growth, organizations may not have a chief information and security officer (CISO) in place. But as your data privacy and security assurance needs grow, it will become increasingly critical to centralize IT and security governance in one role. However, recruiting and retaining a CISO can be difficult. Enter the virtual CISO (vCISO), who covers the same functions in a virtual, as-needed capacity. The vCISO is also most often a team of experts rather than a single individual, providing more collective experience—often at a fraction of the overall cost.
Reason #2: Cost Reduction and Broader Efficiency
Managing IT and security systems is expensive. Ensuring secure uptime requires installing and maintaining a bevy of controls, as well as monitoring the environment regularly. In an internal deployment, dedicated IT staff need to be recruited and retained, which is increasingly difficult.
Working with an external provider allows you to fill IT and security staff needs with contracts, saving on the direct costs of employment—all while producing better security outcomes.
Beyond direct cost savings, there are several intangible efficiencies that come from outsourcing IT and security management to a trusted partner. First and foremost, making attacks less likely means dodging potentially expensive tolls of the incident itself and its aftermath, including things like regulatory fees and opportunity costs of lost business from reputational damage. But also, tech-savvy internal staff can focus their attention on matters directly related to revenue.
Reason #3: Robust Security Assurance and Flexibility
Maybe most critically, the cost savings of working with a managed IT or security partner do not come at the expense of security assurance. Instead, it allows you to build the deepest and broadest protections with complex, overlapping controls that prepare you for any situation.
Two areas that are particularly critical are:
- Installing and maintaining cybersecurity infrastructure and architecture
- Monitoring for, mitigating, and neutralizing threats and vulnerabilities
External IT and security providers will ensure that the specific controls you install meet the demands and expectations of your clientele and partners. That includes meeting applicable regulatory regulations efficiently (see below), but also satisfying customer satisfaction demands like IT support and security helpdesks, which a security operations center (SOC) facilitates.
Cybersecurity Architecture Implementation
The first step toward ensuring security across your IT assets is implementing cyberdefense infrastructure and architecture. The infrastructure consists of baseline foundations, such as:
- Segmented and monitored networks
- Private communication channels
- Perimeter defenses, like firewalls
- Endpoint security across all devices
- Secure app and website development
Then, you need to build architecture on top of this foundation.
It can take the form of individual controls and protections, like antivirus protections and proactive web filters. Or, it may comprise broader suites of services, such as flexible identity and access management (IAM) using multifactor authentication (MFA) to optimize user account security.
No matter which safeguards are best for your specific needs and means, they need to be maintained through a rigorous patch management scheme. Working with a third party will ensure that the right protections are installed and updated whenever patches are available.
Proactive Threat and Vulnerability Management
In IT environments, a reactive posture is one that springs into action only after an event has occurred. Too often, organizations that take a fully internal approach to IT management are forced into this position. They don’t see threats coming and are more likely to be impacted heavily by an attack, natural disaster, or other incident. That’s why proactivity is important.
Working with an external partner on threat and vulnerability management allows organizations to recognize gaps and weaknesses in their deployment (vulnerabilities) early. That allows for mitigation before a threat exploits the vulnerability, making a swift, full recovery more likely.
The most effective approaches take this proactivity a step further with managed detection and response (MDR). These are measures for regular, ideally automated scanning across all assets in your environment. When a threat is identified, it is treated like an event proper, with mitigation teams deployed to neutralize it before an attack occurs. It’s possible to produce this kind of system internally, but working with an MSSP makes it significantly more effective.
Reason #4: Incident Response and Management
Even the most well-defended systems are targeted by cyberattacks. Strong cyberdefense does not eliminate the possibility of being attacked; instead, it maximizes your chances of surviving the incident with minimal, if any, damage. And it’s more likely to work with a third-party partner.
The best IT and security partners follow comprehensive incident response steps like these:
- Identification of the incident and its projected spread across your systems
- Logging and analysis of the incident, its immediate implications, and its causes
- Investigation of the facts, leading to a diagnosis of the incident and mitigation strategy
- Assignment of appropriate resources to neutralize the incident, escalating as needed
- Complete resolution of the incident, including closure of any uncertainties opened
- Ongoing continuity and customer satisfaction practices for all impacted parties
Critically, the final step is a long-term and ongoing concern. In effective incident management, continuity and customer satisfaction do not end with the incident’s resolution. Measures to report on and account for and patch the weaknesses that led to the issue are as important as recovery.
The Benefit of Training and IR Tabletop Exercises
One of the most critical elements of effective incident response is employee awareness. When an attack happens, every stakeholder needs to know exactly what they need to do to stop the spread, prevent data corruption, and facilitate a swift and full recovery. That takes robust IT and cybersecurity awareness training both at onboarding and at regular intervals, ideally annually.
External IT and security partners can help with complex, customized training that includes real-time scenarios, like incident response tabletop exercises. You can simulate attacks on individual segments within your system, like cloud or wifi networks, and test employees’ ability to communicate and set remediation tactics in motion according to protocols. Best of all, these tests can be repeated and modified infinitely to address specific weaknesses they identify.
Tabletop exercises function like a lower-stakes version of penetration testing, providing visibility into your team’s capacity and where they need to improve so that a real attack won’t succeed.
Reason #5: Streamlined Regulatory Compliance
Finally, working with an external IT or security management partner is the best way to meet any and all regulatory compliance requirements applicable to your organization. Most regulations exist to secure specific kinds of sensitive data, related to an industry, location, or other concern:
- Organizations that process personal data are often required to safeguard it according to regulations imposed by those individuals’ local governments. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects the data privacy rights of EU residents.
- Organizations that process protected health information (PHI) are Covered Entities under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Even if they are not directly involved in healthcare, they may need to comply as Business Associates.
- Organizations that process credit card transactions or cardholder data (CHD) typically need to comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS).
Meeting compliance requirements usually involves installing controls and safeguards, then performing an official assessment—often necessarily third-party—to verify your deployment.
Implementation and Assessment Preparation
The first and often most challenging part of compliance is implementing security controls up to the standards required. For example, consider two of the regulations mentioned above:
- HIPAA – Organizations need to meet the specifications of three prescriptive rules:
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- The Privacy Rule, which requires preventing unauthorized access to PHI
- The Security Rule’s administrative, physical, and technical safeguards
- The Breach Notification Rule’s mandated notice to impacted parties
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- PCI-DSS – Organizations need to install protections detailed across 12 Requirements:
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- Requirement 1: Install and maintain network security
- Requirement 2: Apply secure configurations
- Requirement 3: Protect account data in storage
- Requirement 4: Encrypt sensitive data for transmission
- Requirement 5: Protect systems from malware
- Requirement 6: Develop and maintain secure software
- Requirement 7: Restrict access by business need to know
- Requirement 8: Identify and authenticate users for access
- Requirement 9: Restrict physical access to sensitive data
- Requirement 10: Log access and monitor log security
- Requirement 11: Test network and system security
- Requirement 12: Support security practices through policy
Baseline implementation is not the end of compliance. For PCI DSS specifically, organizations need to assess their deployment and provide documentation that proves they have the right controls in place. For organizations with greater annual transaction volumes, their exposure to risk is higher, so assessment needs to be conducted by a qualified security assessor (QSA).
Regardless of what implementation or assessment is required, external help makes it easier.
Omnibus Certification through HITRUST CSF
Another way third-party IT and security partners can streamline compliance is through a unified, comprehensive deployment. One particular framework, the HITRUST CSF, is designed to help organizations meet the requirements of several different regulations while minimizing overlap between control implementation and assessments. It allows you to “assess once, report many.”
The CSF comprises over 150 individual controls, spread across 14 Control Categories. Each includes multiple Implementation Levels. Each sub-control is categorized by general security intensity and whether and how it meets requirements for other frameworks. This allows for organizations to implement as much or as little of the CSF as they need to, depending on regulatory and other needs—and working with a third party will help you recognize them.
Managed Cyberdefense with RSI Security
To recap, the reasons why you need managed IT services in 2023 and beyond have to do with the growing threats of cybercrime and how managed service providers help you meet them. An MSSP engagement will empower you with flexible, scalable advisory and oversight, along with tailored cybersecurity implementation, all at surprisingly low costs. And MSSPs make risk mitigation, incident management, and regulatory compliance significantly easier.
RSI Security is an MSSP partner to countless organizations of every size and across every industry. We believe that the right way is the only way to keep your organization safe, and we’re committed to serving you above all else. To rethink your cyberdefenses, contact us today!