Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

MSSPs: At your service

MSSPs: At your service

With security becoming increasingly complex to manage, formerly reluctant organisations are embracing outsourcing, says Rob Buckley.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | All 5 Pages

Outsourcing has become a fact of life and the market is still set to grow, regardless of occasional scare stories about data theft in Indian call centres. Expensive and time-consuming to do in-house, managed security services have long been on the list of responsibilities for which many organisations turn to external suppliers.

And as the number of threats companies face is rising, so is the number of people signing on with a managed security services provider (MSSP).

Gartner predicts compound annual growth of 14.9 per cent for the market, taking it from £422 million in 2004 to £860 million by 2009.

The boom in cyber crime and other threats on the internet, and the corresponding explosion in technologies to deal with them, have provided enough of an incentive for previously reluctant organisations to consider managed security, and for MSSPs to change the services they offer.

“A couple of years ago, the internet suddenly became full of rubbish,” says Matt Darnell, IT manager at The Fabulous Bakin' Boys bakery in Witney.

“Systems started grinding to a halt.” Faced with the increasing risks to his company, which has grown rapidly and relies increasingly on the web and email, and without the budget, staff or time to cope with the situation in-house, he went to an MSSP. Darnell is now using intY's MailDefender managed service to rid the firm's emails of spam and viruses. He no longer has a spam problem and doesn't have to waste time on infected PCs.

It's a similar story for Martyn Croft, head of corporate systems at The Salvation Army. Although he describes administering two Check Point firewalls and looking after the concerns of individual PC users as the “meat and bread” to the charity's 24-strong IT department, the difficulty of managing content filtering and email led him and his team to use MSSP BlackSpider.

“I'm not a big fan of outsourcing,” he says. “But I wouldn't view this as outsourcing. It's an appliance.”

These managers have decided to bring in MSSPs because they don't have the resources in-house and would be unable to afford to hire them in.

Even larger companies find their budgets are unable to stretch to providing all the security services they require, particularly if they need staff who can react 24/7 across global locations (see case study).

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | All 5 Pages

Interested in commissioning a similar article? Please contact me to discuss details. Alternatively, return to the main gallery or search for another article: