Organizations invest millions in digital transformation strategies, revamping customer success, migrating to a hybrid cloud architecture, and enhancing cybersecurity protection layers. To fully leverage these new business trends, additional operational resources are needed to maximize the benefits of these investments.

In your digital transformation voyage, partners like Hypershift emerge as vital allies in your journey toward success.

Check out: IT Service Management Best Practices for 2024

How is Managed IT Services Critical to Every Organization?

Managed services are simply capabilities that organizations contract to a third party in order to augment their current operational capabilities or provide a complete turnkey offering.

MSPs and MSSPs bring exceptional experience in IT operations, cybersecurity incident response, and application maintenance services. Small businesses needing help with the overall upkeep of their legacy and next-generation networks/platforms are ideal candidates for a managed services engagement.

Ten Indications That Signal Your Need for Managed IT Services

Most organizations go through several changes annually that hurt their ability to protect their assets, sustain their compliance obligations, and become agile enough to meet their desired goals.

Failure to maintain and adjust internal operations processes and capabilities doesn't need to add to that headache. Here are ten indicators that an organization should consider managed IT services:

1. Does your organization suffer from a constant high turnover rate in IT operations or cybersecurity engineers?
2. Does your organization stay up to date with all possible cybersecurity alerts?
3. Did your organization deliver consistent cybersecurity awareness education every quarter?
4. Did your organization fail a recent PCI, HIPAA, or GDPR compliance audit because of a breakdown in deploying effective countermeasures against a ransomware attack?
5. Are users opening an excessive number of helpdesk tickets for similar issues that seem to go unresolved for long periods of time?
6. Did your organization sustain a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack with no means to block it from propagating to other networks, including connections to supply chain partners and third-party cloud providers?
7. Did your organization see a dramatic increase in cyber insurance premiums because it failed to demonstrate proper incident response and reporting capabilities?
8. Did a recent upgrade of internal networks and security adaptive controls fail, resulting in an extensive system-wide outage?
9. Did a recently launched application become breached within a matter of minutes after being placed into production?
10. Has your network suffered a material breach from the non-patched host or network device?

These ten indicators do not comprise an exhaustive list. Many other issues should compel senior leadership to evaluate various managed services offers, including preventing additional investor lawsuits and blocking attacks from third-party software supply chain SaaS offerings.

What are the Benefits of Managed IT Services?

Several of the indicators focus a great deal on the challenge of retaining or having access to experienced cybersecurity talent. Regardless of organizations' challenges—developing nurturing engineers, operations administrators, and solution architecture are costly but essential realities.

Solving the human capital resource challenge helps organizations address a few indicators, resolve incident response and root-cause analysis quickly, and ensure all systems, devices, and applications remain updated with current releases.

Organizations suffering from talent challenges often leverage MSPs and MSSPs to help augment their current internal staff with experienced national and global resources, even to provide a complete 24x7x365 service.

• MSSPs specialize in cybersecurity incident response, threat modeling, threat research, proactive monitoring, reporting, and automated system maintenance of all security devices, including firewalls, IDS, identity management, email security, and encryption capabilities.
  

• MSPs specialize in traditional IT services, including patch management of endpoint devices, remote monitoring, network management, and software installation of new code releases to an existing platform. They are experienced in monitoring specific applications, SaaS-based cloud services, or on-premise platforms.

CIOs and CISOs collaborate with the MSSPs and MSPs to ensure they understand the business's objectives; including meeting all service level agreements (SLA), completing all relevant maintenance tasks, and showing effective collaboration between themselves and internal IT teams.

MSP and MSSPs' Role in Cost Savings and Reducing Duplication of Services

Organizations evaluating potential MSPs and MSSPs should look for companies with experience in services relevant to their business objectives and expertise in their respective marketplaces. Understanding the cost models for managed services is also a critical part of the evaluation.

CIOs and CISOs are routinely battling operational costs, attempting to achieve results with often reduced resources. MSPs and MSSPs can frequently deliver their services at a lower cost than an organization staffing its internet security operations (SecOps) or IT operations.

Service providers will staff their respective services with global and domestic talent. This blend of experience often leads to a lower burn rate by resource, helping the client increase their operations capability at a lower cost point.

Another critical benefit MSPs and MSSPs deliver is their ability to help organizations reduce infrastructure, process, and excessive human capital duplication.

Traditionally, IT departments and cybersecurity teams have reported into the same organization chart. For compliance reasons, many organizations divided the teams reporting to the CIO for IT, and to the CISO for security. Respectively, the risk management team and compliance people also split off into separate leaders. This separation of duties is called out in several compliance and privacy mandates:

• GDPR - (EU) General Data Protection Regulation

• HIPAA - Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

• PCI DSS - "PCI SSC standards and resources help protect the people, processes, and technologies across the payment ecosystem to help secure payments worldwide."

• NIS2 - (EU) "The NIS2 Directive is a piece of European Union legislation that imposes stricter cybersecurity obligations on entities operating in various critical infrastructure sectors, as well as important sectors."

Failure to comply with these regulations can cause significant financial penalties, legal action, and reputation damage.

For example, PCI DSS can issue $500,000 penalties per incident to non-compliant merchants. In cases of GDPR non-compliance, potential fines can reach up to 4% of an organization's global revenue.

Discovering the Duplication of Effort and Technical Controls

Organizations engaging in business operations in the EU or domestically can spend millions annually on cybersecurity infrastructure, human capital resources, and managed services. CIOs and CISOs must challenge their teams to evaluate cost-effective and scalable solutions to address these mandates.

In evaluating and deploying technology investments for cybersecurity threats, discovering a duplication of effort and resources is expected. Most organizations will deploy a stop-gap solution to meet critical times for a compliance mandate or a new system going to production. Over time, they will discover several duplicate firewall pairs, redundant email security solutions, and data replicating across several cloud storage providers.

MSPs and MSSPs will regularly complete an assessment of a client's network and systems before starting any engagement. These assessments help the organization where duplication exists and the financial impact of these overly redundant devices and systems. Upon completing these assessments, these providers will recommend displacing or redistributing these redundant resources.

Critical Note: MSP and MSSP assessments help organizations develop realistic cost-redundant models and insight into possible greater operational efficiencies gained by engaging with these service providers.

MSSPs Assist Clients in their Progression to an Enhanced Proactive Security Model

CISOs and CIOs continue to invest in their respective security and IT operations teams to help move the organization away from a reactive to a more proactive security posture.

To become a proactive security operation, organizations must recognize the need to invest in next-generation capabilities. This includes artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and extended detection and response (XDR). These investments have become necessary for organizations to combat next-generation AI-enabled security threats. Hackers like the internal SecOps engineers have become masters of ChatGPT, WormGPT, and FraudGPT tools.

Organizations can no longer rely on a human being to handle every incident showing up in the security monitoring console or expect to manage every aspect of their complex environments attached to their core operations.

SecOps engineers have a tendency to suffer from burnout because they monitor the ever-increasing number of cyberattack incidents. Even with advancements in security orchestration and automation response (SOAR), these precious resources will leave and move on to another company if their stress levels do not subside.

MSPs and MSSPs offering a co-managed services approach can assist organizations with additional incident response automation experience and help prevent their most valuable talent from burning out. One proven strategy organizations have leveraged was for their internal SecOps and IT Ops engineers to focus on strategy business objectives during regular business hours and leverage the MSP/MSSP to handle network monitoring and incident response. These providers could support these activities during regular business hours, after hours, or 24-hours!

With the pressure off, your internal SecOps and IT engineers can focus on strategy projects—including finding ways their respective organizations can adopt additional technological advancements in business processes in a secure, scalable, and flexible manner.

Avoiding Risks: How to Choose the Right Managed IT Service Company

Choosing which MSP/MSSP to hire requires the CIO and CISO to define their expectations for the engagement. Will this engagement become an augmentation to support their internal SecOps and IT Ops teams or become a complete out-source?

Another critical factor when considering which MSP/MSSP to use is the providers' expertise within your market space.

Many MSPs/MSSPs have extensive experience in the federal government space with expertise in FedRamp certification and ongoing operations. Others may have a focus on healthcare and financial services. Choosing an MSP/MSSP with existing clients in your marketplace has pros and cons. If the MSP/MSSP is currently managing security systems for your top competitor, this could create a conflict of interest.

Other factors supporting the decision to hire the correct MSP/MSSP are the cost and the ability of the provider to meet or exceed the contractual service level agreements (SLA). Most MSPs/MSSPs bidding on additional protection understand the need for a lower cost; however, service providers that choose this strategy often need help to meet critical SLAs. While the service price is essential to the CIOs and CISO, especially if the managed service expense is currently out of the budget, having an MSP/MSSP with a proven track backed up with relevant customer references should be more paramount.

MSPs/MSSPs with a poor track record of meeting SLAs will only incur additional costs for your organization. During an actual crisis, if the provider cannot deliver contact service promptly, the organization may have to pay an additional service provider to come as a stop-gap.

Why Hypershift as Your Managed Service Provider?

At Hypershift, we embrace the significance of tailoring our services to meet diverse needs, rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach. Through thorough pre-service assessments, we craft managed services that prioritize alignment with our clients' cost, operational, and service level requirements from the outset.

Each engagement from Hypershift begins and ends with a commitment focused on the customer. At Hypershift, our emphasis lies in cultivating lasting relationships with our clients, surpassing mere transactional interactions to foster genuine growth and collaboration.