The Critical Need for MSSPs

Congratulations, you built a company worth breaking into!

Seriously – there are, right now, Criminal Enterprises that are executing deliberate and methodical plans of attack in order to breach your company and strip it of its most valuable assets. Cybercrime is a multi-billion dollar business, and cybercriminals capitalize on finding new ways to exploit increasingly complex network environments like yours. To stay ahead of detection technologies, cybercriminals are continually developing new techniques and resources to bypass security and evade detection. Which means that today’s threats come from multiple directions, sometimes all at once, sometimes, a little at a time.

Your security team needs to find these threats before they can compromise your business. Which means they need to be able to sift through and correlate all the evidence being produced by your network, including log files and management consoles from scores of devices, and then identify an attack pattern from hundreds or thousands of incidents in order to protect your organization. This requires resources many organizations simply don’t possess.

Unless THIS is your core competency, you need help.

Differentiate tools from those who use them.

Organizations are deploying new technologies that are essential for successfully competing in the digital economy, including BYOD, applications, IoT, SDN, Public/Private/Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, interconnected network ecosystems (network of networks), and employees blending work and personal data on a single device

They are also wrestling with balancing the need for these new technologies with the risks they introduce. Security needs to enable the successful adoption of these new technologies, not limit them. But for most organizations, network security is comprised of a variety of security devices, often from different vendors, deployed at discrete places across the network. Most of the time, they are isolated and siloed, which means they only see the bit of the network in front of them, and don’t talk to many of your other tools.

The problem is that just as networks are undergoing a radical transformation by adopting such things as virtualization, IoT, increasingly mobile workers, and cloud-based services, we are also experiencing a significant cybersecurity skills shortage. Right now, it is estimated that over a million cybersecurity jobs are going unfilled. And many of them aren’t looking for someone with a newly printed security certificate. They need seasoned professionals who can stay a step or two ahead of the criminals who mean to do them harm.

Why an MSSP? 

In today’s digital economy, the collection and distribution of data is the new currency of business. Its growth is driving the explosion of IoT and other connected devices, the expansion of the network into the cloud, increasing hyperconnectivity between networks, and the emergence of the new digital economy.

Most companies aren’t in business to operate and secure networks, especially not ones that are as highly distributed and dynamically changing as the ones being developed and deployed today. To be successful, organizations need to instead concentrate on their core competency. The majority of their resources and overhead are dedicated to providing the products or solutions they provide to their customers.  

As a result, organizations are increasingly outsourcing critical security services to Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) who possess the advanced security skills and technology needed to span the distributed network, integrate with on-premises, cloud, or hybrid solutions, and implement and enforce seamless security policies.

They are able to combine NOC and SOC knowledge, resources, and procedures to deliver a holistic approach to finding threats lurking across email, web, mobile, IoT, and even social vectors.

Choosing the Right MSSP Team 

Fortinet has a portfolio of leading security products designed to detect and respond to advanced threats. And we have also developed the Fortinet Security Fabric, which allows organizations to tie their security solutions together into a holistic, synchronized solution that consolidates visibility and increases awareness and expands control.

But even the most sophisticated tools are only as good as the experience behind them. Making connections between devices and events so you can pull out the threat intelligence from the noise takes experience. It’s easy to pick up a hammer and chisel and break up rocks. But it took a lifetime of experience for Michelangelo to carve David from stone. In the same way, effective security is as much art as it is science.

Which is why Fortinet also works with experienced and proven MSSP’s, like our recently announced partnership [hyperlink to announcement] with the team at Leidos, to provide their deep bench of seasoned security professionals with the most advanced and integrated security technologies in the industry.

Leidos has been providing NOC and SOC operations for organizations with the most stringent security requirements, for over 17 years. Their staff has a minimum of five years of hardened security experience. Most organizations would be hard pressed to develop the same expertise inside their own IT teams. MSSPs like Leidos are able to provide organizations like yours with a wide range of professional security services, from turnkey security solutions to supplementing your deployment with additional skills and technologies to fill in the gaps.

With the right combination of leading security technologies and proven security expertise, a comprehensive security deployment is able to dynamically adapt to changing network configurations, see and correlate intelligence collected from across the entire distributed landscape, and automatically establish and enforce policies as the environment being protected adapts to shifting business needs. And do it with the accuracy and speeds today’s businesses require, anywhere along the attack surface, from the smallest of remote devices all the way into the cloud.