Managed Services: Providing Expert Protection and Stability
Finding security for your network, your data and your data center systems in the insecure digital world is an essential IT necessity. Unfortunately, it is a comfort that many IT leaders have found increasingly difficult to achieve year after year.
Most company executives understand that IT security breaches not only risk system availability and data integrity, but also carry severe financial, legal and reputational consequences. On a more granular level, keeping pace with evolving threats, new standards for compliance, and personal data security and integrity laws is a non-trivial commitment of time, money and resources. This can be especially challenging as companies face skills shortages, hiring freezes and staff productivity obstacles.
The growth of new types of threats, the frequency and diversity of these various potential attacks, and greater complexity in technology leading to new vulnerabilities discovered all the time leads to another a common concern. How do organizations stay on top of evolving industry standards and best practices, emerging threat vectors and frequently revised regulatory compliance needs? Relying on in-house staffing — once an operational norm — has two serious drawbacks. First, businesses are finding that the availability of qualified digital security experts is not keeping pace with the growth of the need in the industry. Second, continuing education on security and compliance for IT staff is both expensive and time-consuming — leaving IT leaders attempting to maintain a balancing act between security and productivity.
More than one-third of IT leaders surveyed by Gartner cite reducing time to market and driving innovation as key drivers behind their initiatives. But that push leaves IT teams in the difficult position of constantly juggling priorities and requests from the business units they support with their own necessary but revenue-draining maintenance tasks. The end result is that services such as compliance, audits and disaster recovery don’t always take precedence when competing against urgent business demands or pressure to deliver new revenue-generating programs and projects.
Managed security services help eliminate this trade-off both now and in the future. Not only does this type of support address existing issues, but providers also deliver ongoing intrusion detection, remote access support and multi-site disaster recovery. Organizations rest easier — and can be more productive — when their IT security is handled by a team of experts whose sole job is to stay on top of the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats. And when it comes to regulatory compliance, specialists trained in requirements from the federal government, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), as well industry standards such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), can help support regular audit requirements against these standards.
Whether workloads run in the cloud, on systems hosted in a provider’s secure data centers, or a hybrid of cloud-hosted and on-premises solutions, businesses of any size can rely on experienced managed services teams like those at Flexential to ensure their systems remain highly available, secure and compliant.