When it comes to the smooth running of an organization, no one should avoid the implementation of appropriate technologies and take any risks to keep the business safe from hackers and other threats. While Managed Service Providers (MSPs) focus on managing your IT infrastructure, the importance of MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider) cannot be overstated. To get the right solution for your business requirements, first, you need to understand the difference between MSP and MSSP. This will help you to choose the right service provider for your organization.
As the name suggests, the main difference between an MSP and an MSSP is the “security” factor. While an MSP can help you to level up your capabilities across different areas, an MSSP offers you an elevated level of cybersecurity solutions and around the clock network monitoring facility and proactive security tactics.
It is important to have a proper understanding of the differences between an MSP and an MSSP and their importance in your business to choose the right solution for your business. Let’s start with a brief introduction of MSP and MSSP and their services packages.
What is a Managed Service Provider (MSP)?
An MSP is there to manage, monitor, and improve the IT infrastructure and network of your business. This service provider ensures that your organization has what it requires to run smoothly. Your managed IT services partner looks over your data and makes sure that it’s available and useful to both employees and end-users who need it.
MSP focuses on technology administration, offering advice and services to address your organization’s tech challenges and upgrade needs. Your managed IT services provider can help you in multiple tasks, including onboarding new employees in the tech system of the organization, recording, and providing log data, granting permissions to employees based on their roles and responsibilities, data backup and recovery, and troubleshooting when there is an incident. An MSP can also provide training and tech support to employees to do their job well.
In short, an efficient MSP can be an important part of your IT solutions by:
- taking care of your day-to-day IT infrastructure management and monitoring tasks,
- providing infrastructure, application, and network security support,
- helping with new application implementation,
- reducing onboarding issues,
- freeing up your regular IT staff from IT monitoring and maintenance.
What is a Managed Security Service Provider?
The main purpose of an MSSP is to form a fortress surrounding your company and keep your data safe. MSSPs supply outsourced security services, software, and expertise to provide top-tier cybersecurity to organizations.
Organizations can hire MSSP’s cybersecurity monitoring and management service to complement or replace their in-house security operations center (SOC). Most of the time, companies choose to outsource to an MSSP as they don’t have the right amount of cyber expertise in-house or are not able to find the right kind of security experts.
In general, the MSSP’s services include proactive approaches to take care of all your data and cyber security needs, like firewall implementation and management, anti-virus setup and management, virtual private network (VPN) setup and management, event monitoring and alerting, intrusion detection/prevention capabilities, and incident response. MSSPs can also help you and your staff to identify a cybersecurity breach and how to react.
How is an MSSP different from an MSP?
MSPs and MSSPs both are third-party service providers—playing quite different roles to help organizations to run their business smoothly.
While many MSPs are enhancing their cybersecurity offerings, their core focus remains on supporting clients’ IT needs. On the other hand, MSSPs are focused on clients’ data and cyber security.
Considering the clients’ basic requirements, several MSPs provide cybersecurity services like firewalls, endpoint protection, and email filtering. Though these tactics are effective measures to enhance customers’ security posture, but these are insufficient to provide complete protection.
MSSPs offers 24/7 cyber protection to combat security breaches. They provide you protection through around the clock monitoring and speedy threat detection. An MSSP can ensure the security of your business because of its SOC staff and expertise.
There is also a middle ground—MSP+, which offers the typical MSP services along with a greater emphasis on cybersecurity.
This is not about choosing one or the other
Comparing MSPs to MSSPs can be misleading. Both of them have different functional areas and expertise to make your day-to-day smooth, fast, and secure. And, often, these third-party service providers work in concert with each other to provide the best service package to the organizations.
To choose the right outsourcing service, organizations must assess their business and cybersecurity needs while prioritizing their budget.
MSSPs were born out of the increased requirement for advanced cybersecurity. MSSPs were created to meet the demand for 24/7 security access and protection, where traditional MSPs fell short. Several companies still operate with both MSP and MSSP offerings, allowing customers to enjoy the benefits of both services.
MSPs can also grow their cybersecurity knowledge to provide a better service facility to their client. They can include a cybersecurity risk assessment to offer an improved cyber security service. Many MSPs are rapidly improving their security offerings to provide better service to clients.
But, when it comes to third-party service providers, many organizations prefer to hire MSSPs for full-scale cybersecurity.
Conclusion:
Both MSPs and MSSPs are meant to provide separate service lines to their clients, though they share some common service areas, but for a complete service guarantee, one should go for the experts.
MSPs role in IT management, network operations, remote monitoring, and performance monitoring provides massive value to their clients. While an MSSP dedicatedly serves to offer you complete cybersecurity, make you aware of modern security threats, and proactively encounters the attempts of a security breach.
