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How Next-Generation Technologies Revolutionize the Global MSSP Landscape

With the ever-increasing complexity of the cyberattack surface and global threat landscape, organizations of all types and sizes now need to make conscious efforts to protect their critical data against cybercrime, data breaches and intrusions. While a lucky few may have the necessary resources, expertise and budget to handle the monitoring of their environment in house, most companies are simply not equipped enough to take care of this daunting task by themselves… The global cybersecurity skills shortage has made it extremely difficult to recruit, train and ultimately retain talent security staff.

For the past decades, managed security service providers (MSSPs) have made it their primary mission to monitor their customers’ environments on a 24/7 basis, alert them in case of incidents and strengthen their cybersecurity posture.

Unfortunately, traditional managed security services have difficulties catching up. The increasing connectivity of today’s environments, devices and applications has created the need for next-generation managed security services. The next generation of managed security needs to leverage innovative technologies and strategies to help organizations protect their complex, interconnected environments.

In this blog article, we’ll outline what next-generation managed security services are, how they impact the MSSP landscape and how is leveraging next-generation technologies to enhance its MSS offering and better protects it is customers. 

Related Post: The Next Generation of Managed Security Services: Beyond IT

 

What are Next-Generation Technologies?

Today’s Managed Security Service Providers need to leverage a variety of next-generation technologies, not just to stay on top their game but also to offer their customers the best possible protection possible. These technologies include big data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

 

1.    Big Data Analytics

What are Big Data Analytics?

Big data analytics is a concept that refers to analyzing large volumes of data (“big data”).

According to a definition from Techopedia, “big data analytics allows data scientists and various other users to evaluate large volumes of transaction data and other data sources that traditional business systems would be unable to tackle. Traditional systems may fall short because they're unable to analyze as many data sources”.

Related Post: The Next Generation of MSS: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

 

Why Does it Matter for Managed Security Services?

In cybersecurity, every second matters.

That’s why legacy database systems are no longer enough to manage large-scale data sets. Traditional databases were designed to handle data that was predictable when it comes to scale, volume and a set structure.

Today’s data sources are very dynamic and unstructured. That’s where big-data-friendly database systems are extremely practical and necessary. After all, a platform’s ability to ingest and process large amounts of data depends on how its big data architecture is laid out.

For MSSPs to be effective, they need to adopt a data-centric model and use big data analytics to extract meaningful intelligence from an ever-growing volume of data and disparate data sources of data.

In short, big data technologies allow MSS platforms to perform correlations and processing on very large unstructured data sets. Big data frameworks also allow for features such as cell-level security to enable highly-specialized use-cases such as GDPR policies and compliance enablers to be implemented within MSS platforms.

 

2.    Automation

What is Automation?

Techopedia defines automation as “the creation of technology and its application in order to control and monitor the production and delivery of various goods and services. It performs tasks that were previously performed by humans”. In short, automation is there to create reliable efficiencies and enable humans to focus on tasks that can only be solved without involving machines.

 

MSSPs are using automation techniques to provide more scalable services to their customers and achieve more consistent service quality levels.

Especially in the managed security service industry, automation becomes a critical element of service delivery to help standardize service offerings and alleviate the burden of Information Security Analysts, who are often overwhelmed with the sheer infinite amount of data that needs to be looked at, understood and analyzed. The more automated processes become, the better an Analyst can focus on what is relevant for effective, efficient and timely analysis of data.

 

3.    Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

What are Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning?

According to a recent definition by Forbes, “artificial intelligence is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider “smart”. Machine Learning is a current application of AI based around the idea that we should really just be able to give machines access to data and let them learn for themselves.”

Why Does it Matter for Managed Security Services?

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are immensely facilitating the work of the security analysts. These next-generation technologies help eliminate a lot of the noise created by big data volumes and thereby allow Information Security Analysts to focus on the relevant alerts in the avalanche of incoming threat and security information. Although machines will never be able to deliver an effective, the industry is gravitating towards machine-assisted processes.

 

How is Leveraging Next-Generation Technologies?

 

1.    Proprietary ArkAngel Platform

Compared to the large majority of MSSPs, has carved a unique niche in the market as a developer of proprietary technology to deliver its managed security service.

We do not use off-the-shelf products to manage our Security Operations Center (SOC). Instead, we build our own technology to optimize the delivery of our services and maximize the efficiency of our SOC processes and staff, comparable to a tailor-made service to the customer needs and requirements.

Our proprietary ArkAngel platform was built with our customer needs in mind and can adapt to different environments. ArkAngel is technology-agnostic, meaning that it can accept any data source that produces textual output. By offering a single pane of glass, ArkAngel brings together logs from various security controls, along with vulnerability scan results and intrusion detection and any other security-relevant data that you have in your environment. Developed as a data-centric technology, ArkAngel gathers and analyzes information on all IT assets in the client’s network environment to enhance and accelerate the threat detection process.

By combining global expertise, hardware, software and human components, the result is a solution that facilitates the incident management process, provides an enterprise-spanning security perspective and enables clients and analysts to arrive at better decisions faster.

 

2.    Security and Privacy by Design

Privacy by Design is a concept which can be found at article 25 GDPR and was created in the 1990s by Dr. Ann Cavoukian, former Information and Privacy Commissioner for the Province of Ontario, Canada.

In our case, this means that we are implementing appropriate technical and organizational measures that are designed to implement data protection principles in an effective manner. We are committed to ensuring that, by default, only personal data is processed that is necessary for each specific purpose of the processing. This, of course, applies to the amount of personal data collected, the extent of the processing, the period of the storage and accessibility.

Our next generation platform was built with the idea of Security by Design and Privacy by Design. By embedding security and privacy aspects into our R&D efforts, allowing us to respond and adapt very quickly and easily to requirements such as the GDPR, requiring a certain level of data disclosure and obfuscation of personal data, while still delivering the same high level of security services.

In practice, this means that we are proud to be able to offer our customers cell-level security – a security mechanism that enables data of various security levels to be stored within the same row, and users with varying degrees of access control to query this data without compromising data confidentiality.

Related Post: GDPR: What is Privacy by Design?

3.    Artificial Intelligence

Hitachi Systems Security is applying artificial intelligence everywhere where it is useful, allowing us to deliver an efficient and consistent service across all our customers and industries that we service.

With customers having more and more distributed data and services models, you can’t deliver the same level of security service across all customer infrastructures in the traditional way. This leads us to work with customers to define the criticality of their systems and information and correlate it with their risk appetite, which is attached to these assets to deliver a service that fits the risk profile.

In short, we are taking a risk-based approach to delivering our security services to provide the customer with the maximum value and the best possible return on security investment.

In Closing

When choosing your managed security service provider, make sure to ask about whether or not your MSSP leveraging next-generation technologies such as big data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence or machine learning.

Nowadays, MSSPs need to be able to do many things: gather insights on the global threat landscape, demonstrate expertise in a variety of industries and organizations, have extensive in-house security expertise and show a thorough understanding of your business context.

In addition, MSSPs need to show that they have the necessary tools, strategies and next-generation technologies in place to tackle the security challenges of today and tomorrow. is proud to have developed a clear vision on next-generation managed security services to help our customers strengthen their security posture, protect their critical data and meet the most stringent data confidentiality requirements.

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