While some healthcare organizations opt to staff their own internal cybersecurity team, a growing number of executives are turning to a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) to coordinate cybersecurity throughout their healthcare facilities.

An MSSP offers an alternative approach to staffing your own 24/7 security team, as these organizations specialize in customized cybersecurity and management solutions, which may include monitoring and management of SIEM, firewalls, virus detection, and data loss prevention.

Understanding some of the many advantages that working with an MSSP offers over building your own cybersecurity team can help you determine if it’s the right choice for your healthcare organization.

An MSSP partner offers several mission-critical benefits to healthcare organizations:

Cost savings

Many healthcare leaders are surprised to learn that partnering with an MSSP for their cybersecurity management needs offers significant cost savings when compared to managing efforts with a full-time internal team.

Staffing your own 24/7 security department often incurs excessive costs in employee hiring, salary and benefits, as well as on-going training expense.  These hefty expenses can be eliminated when working with an MSSP.

Increased team bandwidth

A managed security service provider not only saves your company money, but it can also save your organization time as well.

You’ll have the opportunity to hand over data security to a trusted team of experienced professionals (what they do best), so you can focus on other core business functions and responsibilities to keep your organization operating at maximum capacity (what you do best).

Industry expertise

Cyber risks, threats, and breaches are continually evolving, making it virtually impossible for medical providers to keep up. Fortunately, working with an MSSP means you won’t have to.

Your chosen managed security service provider will offer a team of industry specialists trained in the very latest cyber attack trends to help keep your company one step ahead of the hackers.

Proactive security measures

Managing system safety internally often means reacting to potential threats. However, an innovative MSSP will proactively add various layers of security throughout your network to fortify your system against external attacks.

Your trusted provider will partner with you to determine the specific design of your existing system as well as operational needs for internal users. From there, your MSSP will customize a solution, implementing various features that may include firewall configurations, security patches, and anti-malware software components.

Additionally, an MSSP will serve as an extension of your team, training employees across the organization on crucial safety components such as how to avoid viruses and understand the differences between an email from outside senders and those from within the organization.

Accelerated response time

Unfortunately, no matter how well-trained your staff is, or how many protective layers you add to your network, no security measures can guarantee that a system compromise won’t occur.

When it comes to network threats and data loss prevention, response time is everything. Internal resources, spread thin trying to manage multiple other organizational tasks and initiatives, may miss the initial indicators of an attack… until it’s too late.

A managed security service provider makes system management and monitoring their top priority to help prevent a network breach before it occurs, as well as fast-track response time to an issue in the event it does happen.