Do MSSPs Have What it Takes to Win Today's Cybersecurity War?

Watching the last Super Bowl, I realized something – it takes a great coach and a great team with a little bit of luck to win.

The coach needs a great team, players to rely on and utilize for best performance. A great coach understands football, provides the game plan and the right strategies to stop the opponent from breaching the team’s defences. Clearly, defense plays a key role in the team's success!

Much like the Super Bowl, nobody can win at cybersecurity alone. Cyberattacks are growing in number and in scale, the strategies and techniques are increasingly sophisticated and the scope is global. Businesses today, in spite of spending time and money on their security, sometimes still don’t feel secure.

For many businesses, teaming up with Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) to fight attackers with best practices becomes the best choice. Additionally, it is critical for MSSPs to partner with the right cybersecurity vendor to bring excellence to their defence teams. It takes a holistic, forward-looking and highly collaborative approach to win the cybersecurity war. 

Battle Tactic #1: Enterprises should lean on Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) to improve their security posture.

In today’s hyper-connected world, cybersecurity is more important than ever. A robust cybersecurity strategy is a critical part of organizations – large or small. Maintaining a strong security posture helps businesses increase their productivity by safely enabling applications, cloud services, mobility and connected internet of things (IoT) devices.

However, many organizations lack the cybersecurity skills, automation and resources to keep up with today’s rapidly evolving security threats. This is driving demand for MSSPs to deliver services that help any customer minimize business risk. 

Managing security can be a daunting task! As organizations expand across multiple locations, their applications are distributed across public, private and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments. MSSPs are pressed to deliver seamless, scalable and automated security in order to demonstrate their ability to enforce higher standards of protection and compliance. 

This becomes even harder across a fragmented security vendor landscape that forces MSSPs to manually stitch together insights from many disconnected sources before they act. The outcome? Increased operational costs and challenges that prohibit MSSPs from successfully defending customers from the dangers of an ever-evolving threat landscape. 

Considering these factors, how should MSSPs establish themselves as trusted security advisors and still remain competitive? 

Battle Tactic #2: MSSPs should select a cybersecurity vendor with a unique approach to cybersecurity.

What MSSPs need is a comprehensive yet cohesive security solution that enables them to deliver unrivaled protection consistently to their customers without incurring high costs. They need a platform that enables any use case, from managing firewalls or cloud-delivered security as a service, to securing remote users or branches to automating security operations center (SOC) operations. 

They need a security solution that is 

• • Simple, to reduce operational complexity with natively integrated innovations that are cloud-delivered and easy to deploy and operate.
  • Intelligent, a self-updating security platform supported by global threat intelligence – like Unit 42 and Cyber Threat Alliance – that leverages machine learning and AI to stop any attack in realtime.
  • Predictive, to stay ahead of attackers’ evolving techniques with an AI-driven, state-of-the-art machine learning framework for continuous learning and prevention.
  • Integrated and scalable, to ensure rapid deployments and faster time-to-market in a profitable manner, without incurring high operational costs.
  • Flexible, to enable the creation of differentiated services to address the requirements of any market and deliver compelling offerings to more customers for less.
  • Automated, to liberate SOC engineers from repetitive tasks and combine security orchestration and automation, incident management and interactive investigation into a seamless experience.

Similarly, organizations need to ensure that they select those MSSPs that are committed to delivering top-notch security.

A Winning Combination: It takes a fully equipped MSSP and an industry-leading security solution to beat today’s cybersecurity attacks.

Much like football fans trust their teams to secure a Super Bowl win, organizations are leaning on MSSPs to minimize business risk and improve their security posture. It takes an excellent managed security service paired with a leading cybersecurity solution, like the one offered by Palo Alto Networks, to deploy a strategy that truly secures a winning business.

By partnering with Palo Alto Networks, MSSPs can: 

• Offer superior security posture for small, medium and large-sized businesses.
• Reach new markets with differentiated services for various industries, organizational sizes and security requirements.
• Accelerate demand for next-gen security services by providing customers with visibility into their apps, users and content.
• Reduce capital expenditure and operational costs by simplifying and consolidating security services and with a usage-based model.
• Reimagine security operations with best-in-class prevention, detection, automation and response capabilities.

In addition, Palo Alto Networks can help MSSPs accelerate their managed security services by enabling a completely new way to build security offerings and drive fast revenues. 

To sum up, overcoming today’s cyber war requires the winning combination of an efficient MSSP fully equipped with the highest degree of protection, security automation, deployment flexibility and management ease – together with a unique collaborative approach that prevents successful cyberattacks. Maybe a little bit of luck, too, but don’t tell that to the bad guys.

Learn more about how Palo Alto Networks collaborates with MSSPs to address the global cyber threat challenge.

This post is part of a series on MSSP partners.