Competitions definitely encourage innovations among competitors, and the demands brought about by competitions make it imperative for competing parties to develop new ways of marketing their products and services in order to gain measurable advantages over their competitors. Similarly, in the industry of mobile and internet services, the growing competitions apparent in the industry has already engendered a need for better services; hence, most mobile services and internet providers are already hard-pressed to improve their services; otherwise, their subscribers will simply shift to the services of the nearest competitors at hand.
Losing subscribers due to bad security service often creates a negative domino effect. A lost subscriber will often tell other subscribers about his/her dissatisfactions with a telecom service provider, and in turn, the malicious words of this dissatisfied customer may eventually do harm to the reputation of the said service provider. Hence, it is critical for telecom service providers to preserve their untarnished reputation as an excellent service provider, especially, in the area of network or domain security. However, it is not always easy to stay at the helm of the competition, considering the fact that other mobile service competitors are also innovating and doing their jobs in making their services secure and on par—if not better—than others. Hence, often internet service providers have to hire one of the best managed security services providers and managed services at hand to enable themselves to find new and innovative ways of marketing their businesses to their present subscribers as well as to their prospective subscribers.
What Can a Managed Security Service Provider do for an Internet Service Provider?
Managed security services Providers (MSSP) have been here since the early 1990’s, and the origin of MSSP could be traced to the early ISPs that usually provided firewall appliance to their customers. This firewall appliance usually came with a fee. At present, a managed security service provider generally provides a systematic approach to the management of the security needs of an organizational network. The functions of managed security services include the management of the systems that pertain to cyber security, the round-the-clock monitoring of these systems, the upgrading of the security systems, and the assessing of the integrity and effectiveness of the existing security systems. With the managed security services at hand, administrators can now readily focus on the more pressing problems and issues of their business.
Vulnerability Assessments of the Security System
The foremost function of MSSP is the round-the-clock assessment of the vulnerabilities of the security systems of an organization. MSSP provides periodic and intermittent software scans to find out if the security systems have some apparent vulnerabilities. The expert security managers of MSSPs often perform penetration testing to figure out if there are apparent as well as actual vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cyber-hackers. Moreover, MSSPs generally engage in day-to-day interpretation of security data analytics and monitoring of the networks.
Aside from helping organizations to improve their network security measures, managed security providers can also help organizations to secure the perimeters of their networks. MSSPs greatly help in managing and upgrading the firewalls of networks by regulating the traffic movements in-and-out of the network, and providing organizational networks with security network analytics that could play a vital role in the security management, charging, and policy control within the network.
Marketing Manager, Allot Communications.
