IT teams are being stretched thin by an ever-increasing number of connected devices and evolving threats against the data that they are charged with protecting. Your organization relies on YOU to provide them with information on risks and solutions – but who can you rely on?
The lack of budget to add full time staff with cybersecurity focus has led an estimated 75-80% of businesses to partner with a managed security provider to help them achieve their cybersecurity goals.
What kinds of initiatives are these relationships able to address? Here are a few examples:
Identify current risks. Just as it is difficult to proofread your own work, it can be a challenge to see weaknesses in your own architecture. Having an outside set of eyes with a cybersecurity focus can bring to light areas that may make you vulnerable so that they can be shored up before an attack.
Help with remediation. Sometimes you may know where your weaknesses lie, but may not be sure how to address them, or simply don’t get the time to do so. A trusted partner can work with you to confirm the remediation steps and assist in performing them.
Monitoring. Yes, monitoring for threats, but also for other odd behavior that could indicate a network issue or even a user concern that should be addressed. With millions of logs per day being generated in many environments, this is not feasible for a typical IT team to handle. Add the burden to monitor 24/7/365 and it’s practically impossible to keep this fully in house. The right solution often includes an outside monitoring service that you can also access to be able to retrieve log information and correlate to events that you may be handling internally.
Incident Response. You get a call at 2 p.m. on a Friday, and it sounds like your network has been breached. You need to confirm what happened, how to stop the attack, and what data has been affected. Do you know what steps to take to preserve evidence while getting back to business as quickly as possible? Working with an Incident Response team to have a plan in place makes an attack far less stressful as they can guide you through this process.
Access to the right skills at the right time. It’s not always feasible to have your all your teams trained on all the infrastructure or even have them available when an Incident happens. Working with a partner allows you access to a greater pool of skilled resources that can be familiar with your environment with expertise in the technology.
Documentation. This is an area where many IT teams fall behind when more pressing matters need their attention. Yet if you must meet compliance regulations or provide documentation to support a legal action, you won’t want to tell the C-suite that you don’t have it in place. A review of what exists is a great place to start, confirm that the policies match the actual procedures, and get the missing documents drafted.
You don’t have to go it alone. Help is here if you need it.
