Small-to-medium-sized businesses and nonprofits across the country are struggling with cybersecurity. Not only are they the victim of 43% of cyber attacks, but 60% of small businesses hit with cybersecurity attacks will close their doors within 6 months. The simple truth is that cybercriminals are destroying thousands of businesses across the United States. Recent surveys show that 47% of small businesses experienced at least one cyber-attack over the last year — with around 8% experiencing more than five.
Recovering from a cybersecurity attack is also extremely costly for SMBs and nonprofits, who are already on tight budgets. On average, small-to-medium-sized organizations spend about $200,000 recuperating from a cyber attack. Unfortunately, many of those businesses also don’t have the tools and resources to prevent further attacks.
There’s a reason that 68% of businesses feel that their cybersecurity risks and increasing — a single hacker can destroy the blood, sweat, and tears they put into their organization. Unfortunately, cybersecurity isn’t cheap. The median salary for a Chief Information Security Office is $226,000. When you include the costs of tech, training, benefits, salary, equipment, and all of the other cybersecurity needs, building a comprehensive security program is simply out-of-reach for the vast majority of small to medium sized organizations.
Fortunately, organizations can leverage outsourced the best Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) for small businesses to help them reduce their risk, improve their security posture, and mitigate cyber-attacks without spending a fortune on software and in-house staff. And those MSSPs bring a host of benefits to these organizations that, otherwise, may be forced to shutter.
What Are Managed Security Services Providers (MSSPs)?
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) provide outsourced cybersecurity solutions that leverage Security Operation Centers (SOC) to provide 24/7 security monitoring and offering organizations tools and services such as:
- next-generation firewalls
- two-factor authentication
- security awareness training
- vulnerability assessments
- storage encryption
- device configuration backups
- endpoint protection
- and more!
These services and capabilities help small-to-medium-sized organizations access the critical cybersecurity resources they need to improve their security posture without having to invest in expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive in-house security solutions.
MSSPs provide a host of benefits to SMBs, nonprofits, and associations who are looking to reduce their overall threat landscape and avoid the high costs of hiring in-house staff and integrating best-in-class software. Here are some of the primary benefits of partnering with MSSPs to improve your security posture.
1. Access to Cybersecurity Experts
Most SMBs, nonprofits, and associations can’t afford to onboard cybersecurity experts. With the median income of cybersecurity experts sitting at just under $100,000, finding the critical skills necessary to create an amazing security culture isn’t easy. A robust cybersecurity presence requires a mix of skills and resources to mitigate multiple attack vectors.
To put it simply, many organizations can rarely afford a single cybersecurity expert — much less a massive team of experts with varying skill sets.
With an MSSP, your organization gets immediate access to cybersecurity professionals with a wide range of skills that will help you build and maintain effective security systems. Since MSSPs solely focus on providing robust Cyber Security programs to businesses, they have an entire staff of fully-trained cybersecurity experts ready to help you solve those pesky security issues.
2. 24/7 Testing Capabilities
SMBs, nonprofits, and associations need to mitigate threats on a global scale, around-the-clock. 24/7 security monitoring helps your business identify threats early, create accurate risk mitigation strategies, and stay compliant with stringent regulatory controls. According to the Ponemon Cost of Data Breach Study, the average Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) to security breaches was a massive 191 days for most businesses.
That means that the majority of businesses take over 190 days to identify and mitigate a security threat. Think about all of the damage that a single hacker can do in that large of a timeframe. All of your customer/member data, files, and systems could be breached and mined for sensitive information and trade secrets.
With 24/7 security monitoring backed by 24×7 security operation centers, MSSPs can help you detect threats almost instantly and respond to them rapidly.
It’s important to understand that even large enterprises get monitoring and incident response wrong. All of those amazing next-gen firewalls, anti-virus, endpoint detection tools, and monitoring solutions can become worthless in the wrong hands. Chances are, your business is going to get lots of monitoring incidents. You need a team that understands what those alerts mean, how to react to them, and how to identify alerts that aren’t false flags.
Organizations often lack the resources to implement effective around-the-clock monitoring solutions. And, even if they didn’t, the current talent marketplace is dry when it comes to cybersecurity experts — who enjoy 0% unemployment rates.
MSSPs give organizations scale and reach that they couldn’t otherwise afford, and it gives them access to the talent they need to manage and maintain all of those rich cybersecurity resources.
3. Comprehensive R&D Capabilities
Yes. Cybersecurity talent is incredibly expensive and sought after. But talent is only one small piece of the cost puzzle for implementing an effective Cyber Security program. You need the tools and intelligence to identify and respond to threats. A solid cybersecurity tech stack is expensive. And the threat landscape changes so rapidly that investing in systems today may not work tomorrow.
Hackers get smarter. Software updates change security needs. And new technologies like IoT and the cloud introduce a host of new attack vectors that businesses have to respond to effectively. Cybersecurity is hinged to R&D. You need the right tools at the right time and in the right systems to protect your sensitive files and your customers’ personal information.
MSSPs not only provide best-in-class cybersecurity tools, but they constantly update them and change them to respond to new attack vectors. Since MSSPs entire business revolves around cybersecurity, they’re in the loop on marketplace changes and new threats that require additional investments. And, since they work with many businesses, they have the means to constantly update and upgrade their tools to meet rising cybersecurity demands.
This gives MSSPs the scale to mitigate risks regardless of changes in the threat landscape. The MSSP can afford the tools and resources they need to respond to emerging threats, and they have the skills and talent to put those MSSP tools to use for your business.
4. Best-in-Class Community Intelligence
Assessing the threat landscape is a community effort. Every day, threat actors are creating new attack vectors, leveraging new vulnerabilities, and finding ways around security systems. You need a constant loop of feedback and critical security news to help you stay alert to the latest and most threatening types of attacks.
At OSIbeyond, our security experts work with organizations across the United States that operate in various industries and sectors. This gives us the scope to identify threats from all of our clients and leverage the insights we gain from those threats across our client portfolio. In other words, we can rapidly discover new threats and create systems for all of our clients that mitigate those new vectors.
We also ingest data from world-class intelligence feeds like Cisco and the Department of Homeland Security. These massive entities are constantly streaming threat data and discovering new attack vectors across the globe. OSIbeyond takes all of this rich intelligence and uses it to create smarter, faster, and more accurate monitoring strategies and security policies.
Hackers target businesses every 39 seconds. For many cybercriminals, hacking and breaching businesses is a significant source of income (71% of hacks are financially motivated). Due to this financial motivation, cybercriminals are constantly looking for new ways to abuse systems.
Open-source systems that make their source code public are ideal gateways for hackers who are constantly playing around with the code to find new attack variants. Believe it or not, 96% of all software (open and closed source) contains open-source components — with an average of over 200 open-source components per application.
Security isn’t static. Every day, these financially-motivated cyber criminals are uncovering new vulnerabilities. With the right MSSP, you can mitigate all of those new attack vectors. MSSPs will constantly be monitoring the cybersecurity landscape to identify new threats and discover strategies to stop those threats in their tracks.
Is Your Nonprofit or Association Looking for a Reputable MSSP?
Cybersecurity can be the bane of an organizations’ digital transformations. But it doesn’t have to be. With a best-in-class MSSP partner, your organization can weather the storm and introduce next-gen security capabilities and monitoring solutions. MSSPs give SMBs, nonprofits, and associations the scale and coverage they need to eliminate threats and constantly monitor for new attacks.
Contact OSIbeyond at (301) 312-8908 to learn how we can help you stay safe and secure in the digital world.