How Can Managed Service Providers Ensure Data Security for Clients

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How Can Managed Service Providers Ensure Data Security for Clients Businesses use MSPs to minimize cyber threats, but MSPs are also vulnerable. Outsourced solutions for data security can be used to enhance data security.

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The advent of the internet has revolutionized our lives in many different ways both positively and negatively. Cyber attack is one such negative impact that can hinder business operations as companies greatly rely on the internet, technology and social media to establish a reputation, and maintain a competitive advantage. However, cyber criminals may steal personal files, bank details, client information, and payment information that are hard to replace, which would lead to potential negative outcomes such as payment of damages, loss of reputation, fines etc. One way companies use to minimize cyber threats are by using the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP). Being cyber resilient helps companies to prevent loss of revenues, business downtime, several unforeseen costs and legal liabilities that come along with a cyber breach. When utilizing solutions such as data cleansing services or data entry services, it is important to ensure that you have a solid data security system.

MSPs are able to improve upon your security controls, authentication services and threat detection to minimize and mitigate these threats. But MSPs themselves seem to be under threat. In early April, the UK National Security Cyber and cyber units at PwC BAE systems found that a Chinese group called APT10 had been using custom malware and spear phishing to gain access to sensitive information held by target companies. Significantly, they made an entry through managed service providers (MSPs) that have deep access to sensitive data from multiple organizations. This shows that MSPs have to beef up their security measures.

Businesses consider MSP as reliable, important IT advisors and these providers have indeed proved very useful. According to a 2016 Comptia report, 64 percent of organizations are using some sort of managed services. MSPs offer distinctive and unmatched insights into an organization’s data centre environment, service portfolios, applications requirements and service and compliance levels along with technology to act on these insights. Today, most businesses depend on cloud storage and new demands are rising each day. Providing actionable insight is not enough for MSPs to maintain their position in the value chain. As per a Sonian survey of more than 320 MSPs, 64 percent said that they are seeing strong customer interests in security offerings. •

The security needed is in data preservation and data access.

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In the case of data preservation, MSPs must ensure that data has not been tampered with or altered because such a violation becomes a ransomware issue.

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In the case of data access, MSPs should ensure that the data doesn’t leak or get stolen by unauthorized parties. This could result in negative public relations or political issues.

Tips to Implement Strong Security Measures •

Have in place solid measures to prevent hackers from accessing or altering data: All MSPs should take steps to review their current email security settings. Increasing protection strength to maximum may not be enough; effective ways to prevent hackers from gaining data access is also important. Make sure that a reliable vendor is chosen to store customer data in the cloud. Also, ensure that the vendors employ security specialists and architects to design battle-tested environment to ensure resilience and privacy. MPSs should look out for vendors that hold third party certifications, including SOC2, PCI, HIPAA and FedRAMP. These certificates show that vendors meet important security requirements and criteria related to factors like structural organizations, policy and procedural communications, risk management, control monitoring, system operations and change maintenance.

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Make use of new security services that target MSPs: Some third party security offerings from vendors like Kaseya, Continuum etc can help in improving protection against phishing and ransomware attacks.

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Prioritize security and awareness training: Training employees about security is always important. Employers and their team should be trained on common hacking tricks to help them identify suspicious activity. For example, when employees receive a password resent email they should not open it. It may look legitimate but contain malicious messages. Taking action in keeping with these rogue messages means that they are opening up their inbox to a hacker. To educate employees about cloud-based email security, MSPs might consider taking a web-based training course which covers topics such as configuration management, visualization security and application security, data encryption, network encryption etc. All these steps will help team members understand the challenges and solutions related to cloud security.

The above mentioned tips should help MSPs offer the security that their customers increasingly demand.

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It takes many years for a business to build reputation in an industry and data security has an important role to play in deciding the reputation of your business. With the emergence of highly sophisticated technologies like cloud computing and platforms for online trading, the choices for hackers have increased. The most common threats today include skimming, data interception and unauthorized access to data flowing through networks. Outsourced solutions are available for data security, and businesses and MSPs can utilize reliable services to enhance security and prevent data breach to a great extent. Besides, it is important that employees receive continuous and regular training sessions to prevent new methods of data attack.

www.managedoutsource.com

(800) 670 2809