As you look at the year ahead, you certainly have some goals for your MSSP business. Whether it’s building on the success of the previous year or improving on something that didn’t go as planned, the new year is a great time to make some resolutions about what you’re going to do differently.
Unfortunately, new year’s resolutions don’t have the greatest track record, so what can you do to ensure success? For three common goals for MSSPs, security automation is the tool you need on your side to help you make your resolutions a reality.
Resolution No. 1: Make My Team Happier
If you want your MSSP to thrive in 2024, you can’t afford to have low employee morale. When your best employees leave, you don’t just lose their contributions, you also take on the cost and distraction of recruiting and training their replacements. Security automation is sometimes stereotyped as a way to replace human practitioners, but this is almost never the case. Automation is actually a great boost to employee satisfaction when deployed properly.
No security analyst wants to spend all day on the repetitive tasks of monitoring endless alerts, copying and pasting data for threat intelligence lookups and switching screens to correlate data across tools. When you automate these time-consuming tasks, what’s left is a lot more time to spend on interesting work that puts analysts’ skills and training to good use, like investigating serious incidents, making key decisions based on automated enrichment, and identifying important patterns.
Automation also helps upskill junior employees, through playbooks that align with your organization’s best practices and integrations that keep most of their work on a single platform, meaning that they don’t have to master the interfaces of dozens of tools.
Resolution No. 2: Improve Interoperability
If one of your resolutions is to get a head start on spring cleaning by untangling your software, automation is a huge asset. Unless you’ve committed yourself to a single vendor’s suite of tools — and are willing to accept the niche that places you in — connecting all the tools in your SOC, not to mention your customers’ SOCs can be a real headache.
Vendor-agnostic automation tools like SOAR and Open XDR integrate with hundreds of tools, which lets you clear out the clutter and streamline your tool usage onto a single screen for alert monitoring, triage, and enrichment. No more jumping between different detection tools and intelligence sources to execute simple tasks.
Increasing your interoperability through automation also expands your potential customer base, enabling you to efficiently connect with different stacks to ingest data and orchestrate actions, all without having to rebuild your processes from scratch.
Resolution No. 3: Grow My Business
Finally, let’s get to the new year’s resolution that is probably number-one on your list: growing your business. This is where automation can do the most to help. Security automation tools are the differentiator for many growing MSSPs, because of their ability to scale an MSSP’s services without proportionally increasing headcount.
When you take the time to add the right automation solution with support from a vendor that understands the MSSP business, everything gets more efficient. Alert-handling, higher-tier services like incident response, integrating tools, and even onboarding new clients can be faster and easier.
For more details on how automation is enabling MSSPs to increase revenue and profits, check out some of our previous articles, like this one about increasing margins with SOAR, this one about improving your analyst to customer ratio, or this one about implementing a lucrative MXDR offering.
Guest blog courtesy of D3 Security. Read more D3 Security guest blogs and news here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of MSSP Alert’s sponsorship program.
