The first step to choosing the right managed detection and response services for your company is to understand what those services offer and why you might need them. These services can go beyond the technology, look to the future, and adjust their solutions to fit your needs. The more you understand about the process, the easier it will be to find a service with the right expertise and delivery capability for your company and your needs.
Managed Detection and Response
Managed detection and response services offer network security services such as firewalls, threat management, and even attack simulations. These can help keep your data more secure from break-ins and can be conducted either in-house or outsourced to an MDR service. One of the benefits of outsourcing your needs in this area is that you can get industry-specific expertise without having a team of experts on your payroll.
When you partner with a managed detection and response service, you are getting access to the best and newest software programs designed to spot potential risks, run attack simulations, and shore up your defenses. This comes with the experts needed to monitor the software, suggest improvements, and respond to attacks. You will also get real-time monitoring of your risks so that an alert can be sent out when an attack starts so that you and your service partner can respond quickly and effectively.
Your Requirements and Trust Level
Determining how effective and well-rounded your current security programs are will go a long way towards choosing the right service to partner with. This is because you see what is offered by those services and how that compares to your needs. It can also help your service provider create a detailed and customized plan to help make your systems as secure as possible.
It is important to interview your potential security partners and offer them hypothetical scenarios to make sure that you are getting a solution that will help your specific company and not a generic plan that may not help. This is also a good way to start building trust with your provider. Your data needs may include restrictions and limitations on what your detection and response team can have access to. It is important to outline what restrictions there are as well as the kinds of confidentiality you are expecting from your provider.
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Technology and the Future
While current and future technology goes a long way towards protecting your data and company, it can be easy to get sidetracked by all the bells and whistles and forget that there is more to cybersecurity than the software. You should also factor in things like the ability of the service provider to access the data given to them by the various software solutions for a comprehensive review of your security. This review can help the provider better understand your risks and how those risks compare to their other clients. Your security partners should also be able to identify and protect against both sophisticated and unsophisticated attacks.
The future of security does not just focus on up-to-date software, detection, and responses; it also needs to focus on where your company is headed and whether your partner will be able to keep up with your growth. For example, you may have a medium sized company right now with less than a thousand visitors to your site a day, but what happens when you hit a growth spurt or go viral, and that number jumps into the millions? Will the solutions and personnel be able to keep up with the increased threat?
Delivery Capability and Expertise
Being able to spot and address security issues is one thing; having the capability to work effectively with clients to provide knowledge, support and repair on a variety of threats is another. Ideally, you can find a partner with the capability to deliver the amount of support that you need at a given moment, whether that is monitoring for alerts, providing training to your employees on how to understand and respond to alerts, or working with you to stop the attacks and repair the damage. This can help you better defend against attacks and learn from previous attacks how to better protect your company. Part of the capability of your provider is whether the service has industry-specific expertise and experience. Insurance companies and retail giants both need protection from cyber-attacks, but that protection can look very different because of the access required to the data at different levels, the types of data protected, and much more.
With the help of managed detection and response services, your company’s data can be more secure, and you can better bounce back after a cyberattack. These services offer everything from real-time risk assessment, simulated attacks, and recovery assistance to help you keep successful attacks to a minimum and more easily get back to business after one happens. You can choose the right company to partner with by doing some research into the solutions and services offered, what your needs are and what capabilities the company in question has.
About the Author: Rick Delgado
Rick Delgado is a business technology consultant for several Fortune 500 companies. He is also a frequent contributor to news outlets such as Wired, Tech Page One, and Cloud Tweaks. Rick enjoys writing about the intersection of business and new innovative technologies.
