Companies are often overwhelmed by the challenges of cybersecurity, from the costs and staffing challenges to the threat of cyber attacks, to the mundane requirements of compliance. These are just a few reasons why organizations turn to managed security service providers (MSSPs) to provide security services. While MSSPs can use automation to economically provide security services, clients want help reducing their compliance workload as well. MSSPs need to deliver actionable recommendations and tactical solutions to close security gaps, assist with remediation, and improve security posture.
In addition, the traditional manual approach to compliance often creates extra work and cost. With recent innovations, MSSPs can now leverage the work already being done for security operations to also satisfy compliance needs. Automation speeds up reporting, freeing up resources to provide guidance on enhancing security and navigating industry standards.
Traditional Risk Assessments Fall Short
Traditional cybersecurity monitoring lets you know what’s being caught, but ignores what threats are not caught. This creates a false sense of security that you’re safeguarding your client’s assets when there are actually security gaps that threat actors could exploit. At the same time, security practitioners know that compliance does not equal security. For example, even if a compliance checklist analysis shows that proper tools are in place, it does not evaluate whether those controls actually stop threats nor whether security teams take appropriate action based on alerts.
However, automated cybersecurity threats assessments now put many of those challenges to rest. Automating the assessment process is essential for efficiently saving time and resources on the way to maximizing security service performance. Automated cyber risk assessment tools like SightGain help managed security service providers (MSSPs) protect their clients against cyberattacks through continuous security testing and quantifiable risk scores. They also automatically score many of the most tedious compliance tasks.
Automated Security and Compliance Solutions
Automated security and compliance solutions for MSSPs can go beyond traditional threat assessments to test cybersecurity technology, processes, and personnel. This approach uses your clients actual security performance to populate compliance requirements. This assures compliance with industry standards, regulations, and organizational policies based on the services you are already providing. For example, threat assessments can conduct live-fire exercises to test responses in real environments, evaluate the effectiveness of security team performance mapped to compliance frameworks, and deliver data-backed suggestions for improvement along with training.
Offering more advanced and automated security compliance services can position MSSPs as more than just security providers, but as strategic partners, and consistently demonstrate the value of your security services by automating compliance tasks. This may also create additional, recurring revenue streams for your services.
Proactive Solutions for Compliance
To be effective, MSSPs must easily deliver compliance reporting for their clients. It’s not just about blocking threats, but proactively testing systems and mapping them against MITRE ATT&CK and compliance frameworks
For example, MSSP customers are demanding data-based metrics for:
- What percentage of threat techniques have been blocked and what percentage of threat techniques have been detected? — They’re not always the same.
- How many of these threat techniques create alerts?
- How often are alerts automatically generated vs. manually alerted?
- What’s the time frame for response?
- Is the response automated or requires manual intervention?
- How fast are you responding to new threats?
Breaches don’t occur from threats that are detected and blocked, but those that go unblocked and unnoticed. Security and compliance need to do more than just stop threats; they need to uncover potential security weaknesses to improve the overall security posture to prevent attacks. This is the sweet spot for automated threat testing.
You also want to benchmark these metrics to show improvement over time as recommendations are implemented. Cybersecurity is a moving target with new threats emerging every day. Clients expect you to be on top of new threats and that an ongoing relationship will lead to a more mature security posture over time.
At the same time, MSSPs should be applying the same process to their own systems to monitor and improve their cybersecurity posture and demonstrate efforts to clients.
“Pro tip: Your baseline can be used as a powerful sales tactic.”
SightGain Automates Security Assessments for Clients
With SightGain, you can automate a variety of security assessments, evaluate the performance of clients’ security — quickly and accurately — and provide evidence-based recommendations for improvement.
SightGain lets you move past time-consuming manual and subjective assessments to automatically test the effectiveness of your client’s cyber defenses, process, analytics, and personnel against the cyber threats they face. MSSPs can offer enhanced analysis beyond what’s possible with traditional risk assessment tools to provide greater customer service, including:
- Quantifying business risk exposure with hard data
- Conducting live-fire tests in real environments
- Measuring efficacy against actual cyber threats
- Evaluating people, process, and technology performance
- Suggesting investments (and divestments) based on proven performance
See how we can help your assessment teams evaluate the security of your customer’s environment accurately and automatically. Get a demo today.
