When and how to bring in an MSSP to help your lean security team
Over the past few weeks, I have written several blogs about the lean security team. As you can tell, I am a fan of these types of teams as they take on the burden of keeping an organization secure with limited resources and budgets but somehow get the job done. One of the main reasons they can deliver results is that they understand what they can and cannot achieve in-house. So what happens when you are a lean security team and know that some new project, or change in your environment, means you need to take on something that you cannot handle with your in-house team? That’s where your managed security services providers (MSSPs) can come to the rescue.
I am sure everyone knows, but just to be clear, let’s define MSSPs.
MSSPs employ security professionals who offer their expertise to organizations for a fee. More specifically, an MSSP takes on the responsibility of securing a portion, or all, of an organization’s environment. Within the MSSP category of businesses, there are several subcategories, from those specializing in a specific industry to those offering “soup to nuts” services. Now let’s talk about one way you might want to consider bringing in an MSSP to take some of the burdens off your internal team.
1st and 2nd Tier Monitoring
Looking at your security team’s workload, I imagine Tier 1 and 2 monitoring consumes more than half of that time. This monitoring typically includes performing a “first-pass” review of the alerts generated by your security stack. If you use an NG-SIEM or XDR, this first pas may consist of the raw and correlated alerts from those technologies. Of course, depending on things like company size, industry, and complexity of your environment, the number of alerts can vary widely. That said, even if you see a few alerts daily, the manual tasks associated with performing this “Triage” can be cumbersome. To that end, many lean security teams will look to an MSSP to take on their 1st and 2nd tier monitoring tasks. The MSSP, especially one using an advanced Open SOC platform like what we offer, should be able to work with any security control you currently have deployed, ingesting your alert data into their platforms datastore.
Then, AI and machine learning can analyze, deduplicate, and enrich alerts with crucial contextual information. Further, if you choose an MSSP using the Stellar Cyber Open XDR Platform, they can identify advanced threats not directly identified by your security stack. The MSSP can perform the first pass review of all alerts and only pass over fully vetted, ready for advanced investigation and response incidents to your team.
The net benefit to your internal team can be summed up simply as this — more time. More time to work strategically on how you protect your entire environment. More time to complete investigations, including post mortems, to thwart similar attacks as quickly as possible in the future. Ultimately how you use this newfound time is up to you, but when minutes are precious, as they are in the world of Cybersecurity, who wouldn’t want to have extra minutes to use every day?
To learn more about how the Stellar Cyber Open XDR platform used by an MSSP can help you achieve your security goals, take the 5-minute product tour.
