How Managed Cybersecurity Can Keep Your Business Safe
Managed cybersecurity solutions are becoming rapidly more popular, and there’s a reason. As the field of cybersecurity becomes infinitely more complex, it becomes more difficult for companies to manage. Companies today don’t want to have to manage their own internal cybersecurity teams. Instead, they want to be free to run their business. Here are some ways in which managed cybersecurity can keep your business safe.
Keeping Your System Current
How current is your software? Have you skipped the last few patches? Are you still running legacy solutions? MSPs focus on keeping your systems and your security updated. And this is critical.
New exploits are released every day; until your system is patched, it’s vulnerable. Ideally, your software vendor will patch your software quickly, but unless you download those changes on your side, you’re not protected. Cyber attackers are going to aggressively use new exploits and try to find the weakest targets.
Further, not all vendors are able to provide security updates in a timely fashion. Your MSP will make sure that you’re using software vendors that are known for high levels of security.
Secure Your Infrastructure with Better Practices
Experts are able to guide your organization through better infrastructure and training, by educating your organization and its employees on best practices. There are a number of ways that organizations are able to reduce their risk, and most of them require addressing the human factors in cybersecurity.
Employees make mistakes. They will always make mistakes. But better practices mean that employees are going to have structure and processes that protect them from making mistakes too frequently. Better practices create systems of control, which reduces the chances that employees are able to potentially cause damage.
An example of a best practice is to make sure that employees are restricted to only the permissions that they need to do their job. If they don’t need permission to install software, they shouldn’t have it. This reduces the chances that employees could install software that they don’t need and potentially break a system.
Experts know how best practices grow and evolve, and are able to educate employees on best practices as they change.
24/7 NOC Provides Faster Incident Response
Responding to incidents faster is incredibly important. A managed cybersecurity team can provide 24/7 monitoring for a system, which means less time for malicious actors to sneak around your network, and less time for viruses to spread.
Consider a ransomware attack that hits a single computer. An MSP will see that the ransomware attack has occurred by identifying unexpected behavior such as large numbers of files being encrypted, and therefore a processing uptick. The managed cybersecurity provider will then immediately shut that single computer down and prevent the ransomware from spreading.
If there isn’t an MSP available, and this incident occurs outside of normal operating hours, the ransomware could spread throughout the entire network and even to the servers. Since the incident has spread, the company may experience thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damages, and may not even be able to operate without its data.
Cybersecurity incidents generally cost companies money in terms of the amount of minutes until mitigation. With faster incident response, companies are able to subvert cyber security issues even if they do occur.
Ultimately, managed cybersecurity can help mitigate many human factors in cyber security, achieve better best practices, adopt better software solutions, and manage cyber security threats faster. And it can do all this without adding to the internal IT burden for the organization.
Of course, just because managed cybersecurity works better for companies doesn’t mean that all managed services are made equal. There are many MSPs out there, and not all of them will provide the services that your organization needs. Schedule an appointment with Red River today to find out more about how an MSP can help you, and about finding the right MSP for your business.
