Engaging MSPs: What Should Customers Look For?
Why Engage an MSP? (Part 1)
Managed IT services is external support for a company’s core IT functions. Specifically, it entails end-user support, cloud, security, and device management. Typically billed at a flat rate calculated on supported users or devices, managed IT services offers professional, expert support at a cost that remains the same regardless of how frequently the support is needed.
There are several reasons why a company should engage a managed services provider (MSP) for their IT needs:
Growing Complexity in Cybersecurity Compliance
First, a limited internal IT team may be challenged by the increasing number of clients asking companies to comply with their cybersecurity standards. These compliance projects are time-consuming to manage and often stretch the expertise of in-house IT, triggering the need for outside tools and expertise. These cybersecurity audits almost always expose areas that require remediation to bring the company into compliance. MSPs can provide much-needed expertise and capacity to help with the additional projects created by an audit.
Limited Internal Capacity
Operations small to large reach a point of maximum capacity with their in-house IT resources. Maybe it’s only one individual who was needed to meet the business’ IT needs when the company was founded. With success, a business grows – and this is to be celebrated.
This growth and success, however, comes with additional IT needs. At this point, businesses can experience substantial benefits from hiring an MSP to supplement their IT needs. An MSP can easily alleviate the burden of in-house IT management and take charge over the company’s IT core operations so in-house staff can focus on strategic IT initiatives, or even projects outside of IT.
Migration to the Cloud
When transitioning to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications, the IT professional’s job description changes. Ultimately, cloud and SaaS applications lighten the IT burden for maintaining application servers and all the associated support functions. The nature of IT work changes as the business looks to IT to focus less on keeping the systems running and more on data analytics, information workflows, employee productivity and security issues. A great MSP can help with the complexity of shifting data and processes to the cloud, while helping the company define and manage new workflows that maximize the benefit from all the cloud services that are being used.
Yellow Lights and Red Lights
There are acute emergencies (red light events) like cyber attacks that cause businesses to look elsewhere for help. There are also mid-level pain points (yellow lights), or areas where businesses know they need to improve but are slow to take action. Most MSPs are equipped to handle all the possible events that can occur, but great MSPs will be able to identify minor issues before they become major issues with software tools and expertise that ensure no interruption to your day-to-day business operations.
Tedious Tasks
Employee onboarding, offboarding, device management, SaaS management – think of the bottom half of the list of IT tasks your company needs to handle for things to run smoothly. These are responsibilities that no one internal is particularly excited to tackle but they need to be managed regardless. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else could just handle all of it for you instead? Yes, that’s also what MSPs do – everything that you don’t want to. A great MSP will not only handle these tasks but will also bring software and expertise for ways to automate and improve the operation of these important but uninteresting tasks.
Why Engage an MSP?
Why Engage an MSP? (Part 1)
Managed IT services is external support for a company’s core IT functions. Specifically, it entails end-user support, cloud, security, and device management. Typically billed at a flat rate calculated on supported users or devices, managed IT services offers professional, expert support at a cost that remains the same regardless of how frequently the support is needed.
There are several reasons why a company should engage a managed services provider (MSP) for their IT needs:
Growing Complexity in Cybersecurity Compliance
First, a limited internal IT team may be challenged by the increasing number of clients asking companies to comply with their cybersecurity standards. These compliance projects are time-consuming to manage and often stretch the expertise of in-house IT, triggering the need for outside tools and expertise. These cybersecurity audits almost always expose areas that require remediation to bring the company into compliance. MSPs can provide much-needed expertise and capacity to help with the additional projects created by an audit.
Limited Internal Capacity
Operations small to large reach a point of maximum capacity with their in-house IT resources. Maybe it’s only one individual who was needed to meet the business’ IT needs when the company was founded. With success, a business grows – and this is to be celebrated.
This growth and success, however, comes with additional IT needs. At this point, businesses can experience substantial benefits from hiring an MSP to supplement their IT needs. An MSP can easily alleviate the burden of in-house IT management and take charge over the company’s IT core operations so in-house staff can focus on strategic IT initiatives, or even projects outside of IT.
Migration to the Cloud
When transitioning to cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications, the IT professional’s job description changes. Ultimately, cloud and SaaS applications lighten the IT burden for maintaining application servers and all the associated support functions. The nature of IT work changes as the business looks to IT to focus less on keeping the systems running and more on data analytics, information workflows, employee productivity and security issues. A great MSP can help with the complexity of shifting data and processes to the cloud, while helping the company define and manage new workflows that maximize the benefit from all the cloud services that are being used.
Yellow Lights and Red Lights
There are acute emergencies (red light events) like cyber attacks that cause businesses to look elsewhere for help. There are also mid-level pain points (yellow lights), or areas where businesses know they need to improve but are slow to take action. Most MSPs are equipped to handle all the possible events that can occur, but great MSPs will be able to identify minor issues before they become major issues with software tools and expertise that ensure no interruption to your day-to-day business operations.
Tedious Tasks
Employee onboarding, offboarding, device management, SaaS management – think of the bottom half of the list of IT tasks your company needs to handle for things to run smoothly. These are responsibilities that no one internal is particularly excited to tackle but they need to be managed regardless. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone else could just handle all of it for you instead? Yes, that’s also what MSPs do – everything that you don’t want to. A great MSP will not only handle these tasks but will also bring software and expertise for ways to automate and improve the operation of these important but uninteresting tasks.
Remote Workforce Business Continuity
Ensure your Business Continuity Plan Secures your Remote Workforce
In our last Securing Remote Workers Blog, we discussed how organizations in today's world must adapt to changing business conditions to ensure a secure remote workforce. Another critical element for securing your remote workforce is ensuring your business continuity and disaster recovery plan includes the ability to support your remote workforce with little or no notice. An organization must be capable of sustaining normal operations due to a power outage, illness, flooding, or similar event, which makes it unsafe for employees to travel onsite. In such an event that disrupts normal business operations, an organization must be capable of rapidly transitioning to a fully remote workforce.
If you already have a business continuity plan, you should consider adding remote workforce security capabilities to your plan, such as:
- Multifactor authentication
- Data loss prevention (DLP)
- Advanced Threat Protection
- Wireless connectivity
If you do not have a business continuity plan, the Department of Homeland Security provides details on the following four steps:
- Conduct a business impact analysis to identify time-sensitive or critical business functions and processes and the resources that support them.
- Identify, document, and implement to recover essential business functions and processes.
- Organize a business continuity team and compile a business continuity plan to manage a business disruption.
- Conduct training for the business continuity team and testing and exercises to evaluate recovery strategies and the plan.
For more information you can download a summary guide here.
PSAP Cyber Risks to 911
CISA Report on Cyber Risks to 911: TDoS
A telephony denial of service (TDoS) attack is a specific type of DDoS attack directed towards a telephone system to bring the targeted system down. These attacks can affect anyone, including our 911 infrastructure, and may often include ransomware requests.
As such, TDoS attacks present a unique risk to public safety communications stakeholders, including Emergency Communications Centers (ECC), Publics Safety Answering Points (PSAP), and other 911 centers.
In response, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) developed the Cyber Risks to 911: Telephony Denial of Service fact sheet to educate the public safety community on TDoS threats.
Specifically, the fact sheet reviews:
- The most common TDoS attack vectors
- Real-world TDoS incidents and impacts
- Best practices to mitigate TDoS vulnerabilities
One of the key takeaways is for ECC/PSAPs should consider a managed service provider to address two of these migrations:
- Implement the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework to improve cybersecurity posture
- Conduct cybersecurity assessments, identify capability gaps and vulnerabilities, and determine appropriate cybersecurity standards
Take Action to Prevent Attacks: Download CISA's TDoS fact sheet to see the seven steps to prevent cyber attacks.
Remote Workforce
7 Critical Considerations for Firewall Performance in the Era of Secure Remote Work
All organizations in today’s world must adapt to changing business conditions to ensure a secure remote workforce. Traditional firewalls cannot scale across multiple applications required for secure telework, placing the burden on IT teams to upgrade existing firewalls. Upgrading outdated integrated firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) solutions become critical requirements to ensure a secure remote workforce.
Organizations are investing in Next-generation Firewalls (NGFW) to provide performance and advanced capabilities required to scale to meet future demands of distributed teams.
Below are seven key considerations to guide your NGFW evaluation.
Download the report here.
1. IPsec VPN performance
Teleworking employees have access to sensitive company data. Protecting this against compromises requires the ability to ensure that remote employee connections to the company network are secure.
To ensure your network is secure, you need to validate that your NGFW can sustain the user connections and encrypted traffic load independent of the location of the users.
2. Threat protection performance
How well does your NGFW perform when running full threat protection? To sustain performance with complete threat protection, you need to insist on real numbers and a close reading of documented performance claims from your vendor.
3. SSL inspection capacity
A majority of enterprise network traffic is now encrypted, and bad actors are continuing to take advantage. Ensure that your NGFW SSL decryption and inspection can offset these security risks and provide predictable performance with minimal degradation in speed.
4. Price vs. performance
Many NGFW vendors increase the size of their firewalls to boost performance and increase the cost. With big leaps in disruptive firewall technology, ensure that your NGFW vendor combines price and performance with an eye to a smaller footprint
5. Credible third-party validation
No organization investing in NGFW should rely on a single vendor. Review third-party evaluations for detailed validation of various NGFW solutions.
6. Easy, single-pane-of-glass management
Security teams that have to toggle between multiple dashboards to assess vulnerabilities, respond to threats, and ensure system resiliency are not efficient. Rely on a vendor that can provide a seamless dashboard that aggregates information for efficient decision making.
7. Future-proofing
All organizations must embrace digital innovation and transformation to become more efficient and secure. Ensuring an NGFW that not only provides performance at agreeable cost and scale but can also anticipate future demands.
