With the blurring of the lines between our physical and cyber worlds, cybersecurity has not only become top of mind, it has also become a business value; it is difficult, if not impossible, to deny this statement. A strong security posture for the company is not just a matter of safety but affects the business top and bottom lines. Therefore, choosing the right Managed Services Provider (MSP) partner is not just a smart security move, but an astute business investment.

For years — if not decades — IT security teams have been considering themselves a bubble within the overall company structure, and the business operations groups has been doing just the same. Nowadays, we know that understanding the connections between the business, operations, threats, and IT risks is the link to connect the two and make them work together for the benefit of the company, not just any single part.

The ability to put mitigations and controls in place to help enable the business while keeping the threats at bay and the risk low is essential. The right MSP will allow you to do just that because it will understand your business, follow its vision and objectives, while improving your security posture.

With the right MSP, you will have a partner that will be more proactive in your risk management — this is true even if you have an IT security team in a place struggling to get ahead of the curve. An MSP can help your teams to become more efficient in the management of the security programs.

Here some possible scenarios:

Short-Handed Security Team

If your team isn't staffed to look at all the risks and threats they face across all critical parts of the business, a restructuring of the team and/or an extension to the team can help shore things up. This may not be possible due to limitations in staffing budget, qualified candidate availability.

Here are a couple examples where the program could be hampered:

- Security and policy definition and IT controls implementation- Ongoing network and endpoint management.

Limited Security Team Scalability and Readiness

If your team is in place but isn't able to keep up with risk mitigation, let alone get ahead of the threats they face, then an MSP can help. Similarly, sometimes there are specific threats or unique programs or projects that can’t be covered by the team you’ve hired.

Here are a couple examples where the program could become distressed:

- Spikes in critical system updates and patch management
- Breach detection and response

Can't Justify Full-Time Employees For All Roles

Sometimes, it makes sense to rely on experts for a business service to handle that part of the business for you.

Here are a couple examples where the program could benefit from outsourcing:

- Compliance and audit
- Bug bounty program management

No Internal Security Team Required

If it doesn't make sense for an organization to get "distracted" by this business's function.
Some examples where the program could suffer from if missing:
- Secure systems and application management
- Vulnerability assessment and management

Startups in the Cloud

Many new, small businesses get started by standing up the majority — if not all — of their business operations in the cloud. Cloud-enabled email.

Cloud-enabled customer relationship management. Cloud-enabled document management and collaboration systems. The list goes on and on. The cloud helps to protect some of the environment, but it isn’t the silver bullet. You still likely need help with the following:
- Web-based and mobile-enabled access control
- Secure configurations and policy management
- Log monitoring and anomaly detection

If you are reading this — there is little doubt at this point — you already know that the business of security is an integral part of your business. As such, you must have the best team and/or the best partner to help you assess, mitigate, and prevent disruption to your daily business activities and be on a more resilient path to growth and expansion.

The WHAT is security. The WHY is the business value of the right MSP partner to grow your company. Do what you can to cover it all, but don’t try to go it alone if it doesn’t make sense.