Understanding 3rd Party SOC Cyber Security
As an MSP business owner, you want to provide the best for your cybersecurity clients. Creating and developing a security operations center (or SOC) is critical to bringing your IT service to the next level.
We’ll outline what SOCs can offer your clients through benefits, what a SOC provides as a service, and the risks of not having a SOC available for your partners.
What is a SOC?
A security operations center (or SOC) provides a team of experts dedicated to monitoring, detecting, analyzing and responding to security incidents around the clock. A SOC offers a range of important benefits for organizations looking to enhance their security posture, reduce their risk and have more peace of mind.
What are the benefits of having a SOC for my clients?
Providing your clients with access to a SOC gives them support via:
Advanced software: Your MSP will actively monitor your clients’ systems around the clock and review alerts within minutes. You provide incident responses to quickly triage alerts, contain active threats, and fine-tune the platform to eliminate false positives and reduce noise and distractions.
Lifecycle management: Your source of differentiation as an MSP can include detection, containment, eradication, recovery, and the necessary analysis to recommend IT actions and post-incident evaluation. Lessons learned are documented and used to further harden your clients’ environment to reduce future incidents and help them sleep better at night.
Always alert: Your clients’ systems are continuously monitored and evaluated to ensure early detection of potential threats and to minimize any potential impacts of a security breach.
Quick response times: In the event of a security incident, your security operations center will provide rapid response and remediation. A quick response minimizes downtime and puts your clients’ systems back online quickly, reducing the impact of an incident on your operations.
Technical expertise: Your SOC is staffed by highly skilled and certified security professionals who have the experience and expertise necessary to identify and respond quickly to complex security threats. Your clients can rest assured that they have access to the best possible security support, even outside of regular business hours.
Cost savings: Your clients can reduce their reliance on internal security resources and outsource security monitoring and response to experts, like your managed service provider practice. This can result in significant cost savings, as businesses are not required to invest in specialized security personnel or infrastructure. Additionally, coverage by a SOC may help to reduce cyber insurance premiums and allow for improved coverage.Meeting compliance requirements: A SOC can help to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements like NIST CSF, NIST 800-171, CMMC and the CIS Critical Controls. Meeting compliance requirements minimize the risk of fines or other penalties and provide peace of mind that the organization is adhering to industry best practices.
What can I provide to my clients through a SOC?
Some of the basic requirements an established SOC can provide your clients include:
- 24x7x365 monitoring
- Certified, experienced experts
- Active response
- Proactive threat hunting
- Email spam/malware (virus) filtering
- Forensic investigations and incident reports
- DNS filtering
- Deployment and onboarding assistance
- Lessons learned documentation
If your client is seeking the best in protection, you can offer these services at a premium:
- Incident response (IR) planning assistance and runbooks
- Security posture assessment
- Managed vulnerability and risk assessments
- Unlimited vulnerability scanning
- Advanced cloud-based disaster recovery package
- Assigned client advisor
- Monthly security posture reviews
- Disaster recovery readiness assessment
- Critical security controls assessment
- Unlimited data ingestions and data retention
What risks do my clients have by not having access to a SOC?
Without an up-to-date cyber security plan and SOC to watch over your clients’ environment, your clients could be risking crippling breaches or hacks, or leaving sensitive trade secrets and client information exposed. Your clients could be putting their companies at risk by making them vulnerable to costly ransomware attacks, which in turn could lead to reputational damage. Not having a SOC could also lead to fines and legal action in the event of a breach.
As an expert MSP, your goal should be to leverage your deep expertise coupled with decades of experience to deliver complete and dependable security solutions to shield your clients’ businesses from any and all threats. Your cyber security solutions should eliminate stress and worry for everyone involved. Ultimately, establishing a SOC for your company will enable you to deliver the best cybersecurity services around.
