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Today in Nigeria we have couple of professional cyber security outlets offering Managed Security Services(MSSP) and ready to help small businesses attain the level of cyber protection required to successfully run their business and give the level of trust required by their customers as to how safe their data is with such Small Business’s owner.
What is Cyber Protection?
Cyber Protection is aimed at providing cyber security for organizations infrastructure and data.
What Small Businesses do for Cyber Protection
Small businesses invest in off-the-shelf security solutions and expecting a lifetime protection from such solution. Ignoring the constant changes in the threat landscape and giving hackers new possibilities of getting their target by leveraging on AI and other automated means available today.
This will push small business to continuously change, update and upgrade their security solutions and systems to meet up but many can’t cope with the investment that will come with reacting to these constant changes.So many of the old security solutions purchased are no longer serving business today due to lack of maintenance, license payment, and lack of proper configuration of these solutions.
Small businesses will find it difficult to cope with workload involved in protecting the business and organization data against cyber criminals due to factors like limited budget, resources and little or no security expertise.
What is MSSP?
Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) are third-party vendors who help organization’s monitor security events and related -information remotely. This is possible through a remote connection between the organization and the MSSP remote Security Operations Centers (SOCs). Services such as network threat detection, threat hunting, security analysis, incident response, vulnerability and risk management, and reporting can be delivered by an MSSP to their constituents.
The risk of outsourcing security services is lower than the threat of constantly facing cyber attacks for many small businesses and this will allow businesses to focus on their core competence.
What are the Services offered by MSSP?
The following are various services that an MSSP offers depending on the need of your organization;
Security Monitoring, Reporting and Alerts
They collect logs and other security events information from organization’s network, analyse them to prepare the security posture of their constituent.
Threat Intelligent Management
MSSP helps with first hand information of emerging threats and prepare their constituent ahead of such threat by providing them with actionable intelligence.
Security Device Management
Update and maintain security devices (such as firewall, network IDS and IPS) configuration and rules settings.
Risk And Vulnerability Assessment
MSSP can help identifies and analyze potential threats, vulnerabilities and determine organization risk level. Providing necessary steps and actions to remediate them using patches, updates and upgrades.
Incident Response & Management
The MSSP is always there for their constituent to help them handle and investigate every security incident, especially in the case of breaches, network down time and malware attacks.
Compliance Management
Most small businesses do not have idea on which part of their IT / security approaches are compliant to various regulations and acts, but the MSSP goes a long way to help ensure compliance for them by ensuring proper implementation and safer approach.
Choosing MSSP for your Small Business.
When choosing an MSSP for your small business,some factors should be considered. Some of the factors includes;
Validate capabilities and expertise
Ensure the MSSP has capabilities and services that match your needs. Like for small businesses, key functions and capabilities requires are mostly security monitoring, alerting and reporting, system configuration management, threat intelligence and risk assessment. Ensuring that the MSSP has experience running remote SOCs is also an added capability to get the best of service.
Commit to SLAs
Decide on SLAs ( Service Level Agreements) that will be followed by both parties. Signing formal SLAs with your MSSP help ensure that you agree to the service standards as required by your organization. This also help defines terms and contract termination conditions. Unclear SLAs can pose a challenge.
Customize your services
Your should be able to opt in for customized services to address specific need of your businesses with your MSSP and complying with industry regulations. Overall, they must be able to meet specific constituent need.
Why Do Small Businesses need an MSSp?
Clearly, the threat landscape is growing rapidly which requires qualified personnel with the use of AI and automated tools, – many of which might not be at the disposal of small businesses. But MSSP is most enhanced with approaches that leverage on automated security technology.
Employing the service of an MSSP will help place your business better protected from cyber risks than others who are trying to do it in-house with insufficient resources and expertise.
