Many organizations now seek to outsource parts or all of their cybersecurity functions to a trusted security provider. Managed security services (MSS) is a service model or capability provided by cybersecurity service providers to monitor and manage security devices, systems, and even software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

A managed security services provider (MSSP) offers around-the-clock (often 24x7or 8x5 support) information security monitoring and management. A global, proactive protection delivery model helps detect and triage malicious security events.

As organizations scale and compete, protecting endpoints, assets and data from exfiltration, breach or other cybersecurity events becomes paramount. The complexity of the security landscape has changed dramatically over the last several years, and organizations need to stay ahead of a rapidly changing threat landscape.

It can add rare, specialized cybersecurity skills to your team, such as cloud security, identity or compliance knowledge, without the need to build your own expensive security operations center. It can also help prevent breaches through automated incident response, remove complexity in security, reduce alert fatigue for in-house resources, and provide proper compliance governance.

An MSSP like IBM Security offers security as a service on IT and information security systems: threat monitoring, infrastructure management, availability, capacity management, proactive protection and response capabilities.

A managed services provider (MSP) generally provides only operational support to keep systems and applications at an agreed-upon service level agreement (SLA).

Security information and event management (SIEM) tools, endpoint detection and response solutions and traditional network security tools are just some. Secure access service edge (SASE), cloud access security broker (CASB), container security software, and even cloud-native cybersecurity solutions within AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM Cloud® can also be part of the engagement.

Modern MSSPs like IBM can monitor and manage the security within public, multicloud, IaaS provider platforms. This can help your organization improve its visibility and context into the overall security program and reduce risk from misconfigured cloud resources.

Regulatory policies are constantly evolving. A global MSSP like IBM brings knowledge of regional and industry frameworks and regulatory requirements. The security provider can help assess current state of security and provide real-time visibility into compliance posture.

Managed security clients will usually log in to a secure portal to submit requests. The cybersecurity provider can then change policies, triage security events, send an alert or even automate response to an incident. The client may also use their MSSP’s dashboards to generate reports on security device status, the number of security events and vulnerabilities, SLA activity and more.

MSSPs provide an array of skilled professionals, such as onboarding specialists, security analysts or service delivery experts, engineering and support, project management and customer service. More specialized roles such as incident response, threat intelligence and threat hunting can be added, depending on the desired scope of the engagement.