A Navigational Tool for MSPs
The NIST
Cybersecurity Framework
As an MSP, navigating the constantly evolving cyber threat landscape on behalf of your clients can sometimes feel like trying to pilot through a turbulent storm.
Fortunately, you don’t have to fly blind.
The Cybersecurity Framework, developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), guides organizations to better understand, manage, and reduce cyber risks by providing a holistic set of industry-accepted best practices, guidelines, and standards. Although voluntary, organizations of all sizes and industries have adopted it as a gold standard, and it continues to be updated and refined through expert input and public feedback.
Aligning your MSP practice to the NIST
Cybersecurity Framework
Aligning your MSP practice to the five Functions of the widely adopted NIST Framework helps ensure that your services and solutions have comprehensive coverage across the full lifecycle of cyber risk management.
Gain a complete view of the risk to an organization’s inventory of systems, assets, data, processes, and policies — prioritizing critical areas that need protection.
Asset Management
Maintain an up-to-date inventory to view and track digital and physical assets.
Assessments
Identify and evaluate the greatest areas of security vulnerability and risk in an organization’s technical infrastructure, assets, and policies.
Security Strategy, Policy, and Process Consultation
Provide best practices for establishing cybersecurity strategies, policies, roles, and responsibilities.
Develop and implement safeguards that will limit or contain the impact of a cyber threat.
Security Training
Provide ongoing training to teach employees how to spot various types of threats.
Data Protection
Protect sensitive business data and proprietary information via encryption.
Compliance Training
Learn best practices for adhering to compliance regulations to avoid fines and penalties.
Web Security
Enforce an Acceptable Use Policy to prevent phishing and ransomware attempts to redirect employees to a malicious website.
Password Management
Automate password protection and securely store, manage, and retrieve passwords.
Mobile Security
Control mobile devices and add a layer of security to protect against malicious wireless networks and application vulnerabilities.
Email Security
Layer email security onto cloud or on-premise email servers to stop phishing and ransomware threats before they enter the network.
Implement tools and processes to enable the timely discover of cybersecurity events.
Monitoring
Take control with proactive threat hunting and comb through your endpoints to search for Indicators of Compromise.
Endpoint Security
Discover and remediate threats across laptops, desktops, and servers.
Email Security
Layer email security onto cloud or on-premise email servers to stop phishing and ransomware threats before they enter the network.
Take rapid action to contain the impact of a detected cybersecurity event.
Endpoint Security and EDR
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) provides continuous monitoring, analysis, investigation, and alerting across endpoints to better detect and prevent threats. Automatically isolate endpoints that show signs of an attack to stop the spread of malware on a local network.
Unified Threat Management
Unified Threat Management (UTM) (also known as “Next Generation Firewall”) secures a network by combining security capabilities such as firewall, antivirus, intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention.
Restore capabilities that were impaired by a cybersecurity event quickly enough to mitigate impact.
Disaster Recovery
IT interruptions from human error, power outages, cyber attacks, hardware failure, and natural disasters can grind business to a halt. Leverage disaster recovery solutions to reduce the cost of downtime due to IT interruptions.
Backup
Accidental deletion or data overwrites are almost a daily occurrence. Cloud backup safeguards data and allows quick recovery of individual files and folders.
SaaS Backup
SaaS vendors like Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Dropbox, and Salesforce only keep data for 30 days after deletion. Utilize SaaS backup solutions to make sure data is protected from accidental deletions, overwrites, malicious internal employees, ransomware, and employee churn.
High Availability
Data loss and downtime for business critical apps must be near zero. High availability solutions enable the re-routing of production data to a duplicate environment in the event of a system failure.
8 Ways to Use the NIST Cybersecurity
Framework with Your Clients
By using the NIST Framework as a tool to navigate cyber risk management, you can help your clients prioritize their efforts, maximize their investments, and minimize the impact of attacks.
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Do you have gaps in your security solution stack according to the NIST framework?
Talk to a Security Expert.
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