March 13, 2025

As organizations face growing IT complexities and increased cybersecurity threats, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) offer a strategic way to manage these challenges. By embracing the “Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast” philosophy, businesses can ensure a smooth transition to managed services while enhancing security and meeting essential cyber insurance requirements.

Think Big: Align IT with Business Goals & Cyber Insurance Requirements

 Before diving into managed services, it’s crucial to develop a long-term roadmap that aligns IT strategy with your business goals. This vision should also account for the need to bolster cyber resilience, especially as cyber insurance providers increasingly require businesses to demonstrate strong security measures before offering coverage.

A good MSP starts by helping you assess your current risk and cybersecurity posture, but a great MSP will use recognized frameworks like NIST and CIS. With these insights, the MSP can create a strategic roadmap that ensures your IT environment not only meets the demands of your business but also adheres to cyber insurance requirements, potentially reducing premium costs.

Start Small: Strengthen Security with a Phased Approach

 Cybersecurity is a long game, and quick fixes won’t provide the level of security required by cyber insurers. Employing a phased, strategic rollout allows you to focus on critical areas without overwhelming your resources. Start small by strengthening basic protections like patch management, endpoint security, and firewalls. This ensures your business establishes a solid foundation before tackling more complex needs. From there, an MSP can introduce multi-layered security, such as SIEM and MDR, ensuring that security measures grow along with your organization’s needs.

In K-12 education, schools often begin by adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) and cloud security to protect staff and student accounts. Food manufacturing companies might focus first on network segmentation and access control to prevent unauthorized entry into critical systems. For healthcare, ensuring medical devices and electronic health records (EHRs) are protected is key to both security and compliance.

Move Fast: Automate, Monitor, and Optimize Security

 As cyber threats evolve, businesses need to act quickly. Real-time monitoring and automation are essential tools for minimizing risks and responding promptly to incidents. Moreover, cyber insurers increasingly expect businesses to demonstrate ongoing security improvements, making continuous monitoring an essential part of both cybersecurity and compliance.

A proactive MSP can provide 24/7 threat detection and automated responses to help contain potential breaches before they escalate. By leveraging SOC services, organizations gain access to dedicated security analysts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats in real time. Additionally, a robust incident response plan ensures your organization is prepared to handle security events quickly and efficiently, minimizing damage and ensuring compliance with cyber insurance policies. Tools like automated phishing detection help protect from cyberattacks, while AI-driven monitoring can detect and stop threats to critical systems.

Building a Cybersecurity Culture with an MSP

 Technology alone won’t safeguard your organization—people and processes are just as important. Fostering a cybersecurity culture is vital for reducing risk and improving compliance, and an MSP can help instill this mindset across your organization.

By providing security awareness training, an MSP equips employees to recognize phishing attempts, practice strong password hygiene, and follow best practices for cyber hygiene. They can also run simulated phishing attacks to test your team’s vigilance and minimize human error. Establishing clear security policies for everything from secure email use to remote access ensures everyone is on the same page, reducing the chance of an insider-related security breach.

Why Managed Services & Cybersecurity Go Hand in Hand

Cybersecurity is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix. The right MSP acts as a strategic partner, helping businesses maintain compliance with cyber insurance requirements, prevent costly breaches, and optimize IT operations.

By integrating managed services with a robust cybersecurity framework, your organization can confidently scale operations without sacrificing security. Whether you’re trying to prevent downtime, avoid data breaches, or simply ensure smooth IT operations, an MSP helps you achieve long-term resilience.

About Mindsight

Mindsight delivers enterprise managed services and technology solutions to the mid-market across a variety of industries including manufacturing, financial services, government, education – just to name a few. Our solution architects and engineers are 100% expert-level and work as an extension of your IT team. Mindsight is headquartered in Downers Grove, IL, a suburb of Chicago.

Mindsight is part of the ACP CreativIT Family of Technology Solution Providers

 

November 7, 2024

“In simplest terms, boards are on the hook for management, governance, and disclosure reporting.”

That was Keri Pearlson, executive director of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan Research Consortium (CAMS) explaining the impact of a fall 2022 SEC ruling. In short, as an MIT News story from earlier this year summarized, “The ruling requires public companies to disclose whether their boards of directors have members with cybersecurity expertise. Specifically, registrants are required to disclose whether the entire board, a specific board member, or a board committee is responsible for the oversight of cyber risks; the processes by which the board is informed about cyber risks, and the frequency of its discussions on this topic; and whether and how the board or specified board committee considers cyber risks as part of its business strategy, risk management, and financial oversight.”

But a September 2024 CIO.com story headlined “Do Boards understand their new role in cybersecurity?” asked if boards are taking cybersecurity seriously enough. “Most boards fall into the trap of thinking that cybersecurity is a technical issue and focus too much on technical protections and whether the right tools are in place to protect the organization,” former Navistar CIO Julie Ragland told the publication. “But we know that more than 90 percent of cybersecurity incidents start with human behavior error. Cyber incidents are as much a communications and legal challenge as they are a technical challenge, so when boards focus too much on the technical, they miss key areas of responsibility.”

Ragland added, “The dollar amount to cover the totality of a cyber landscape for an organization can be huge,” she says. “The board needs enough understanding of cybersecurity to help prioritize these big investments.”

Gartner concurs. Earlier this year, it called on boards to expand their competency in cybersecurity oversight. Said Richard Addiscott, a Gartner senior analyst, “SRMs leaders must encourage active board participation and engagement in cybersecurity decision making. Act as a strategic advisor, providing recommendations for actions to be taken by the board, including allocation of budgets and resources for security.”

By 2026, Gartner predicts, more than 70 percent of boards will have at least one member with cybersecurity expertise—expertise that companies can no longer afford to silo, effectively handing off responsibility to IT departments. “This enables organizations to move beyond reactive defense,” Forbes noted, “meaning that they can act on new business opportunities that come with being prepared.”

Because not being prepared comes with potential costs—financial, reputational and even criminal. And yet, it seems, not nearly enough companies and organizations are taking preparation seriously. Citing a 2023 Heidrick & Struggles Board Monitor Report, Cybersecurity Magazine revealed that “only 14 percent of non-executive director appointments at the largest publicly listed companies were issued to those with some level of cybersecurity acumen, a decline from 17 percent the year prior.”

It’s a dangerous backward trend in an era when cybercrime costs U.S. businesses alone hundreds of billions of dollars annually and is only getting worse. As the magazine wrote, “Cybersecurity initiatives can sometimes be seen as growth restrictors and barriers to efficiency and productivity, but boards need to recognize that reducing threat risk is an advantage, not only to the business at hand, but also to themselves.”

Remedying the situation, which involves internal education (about risk management, in particular) and external assessments, largely falls to CIOs and CISOs.

“With boards seeking external validation on risks, just as they would financial fiduciary through an audit, it’s the executive responsibility of CIOs to provide them with that information, as well as having a fresh set of eyes on an always changing landscape,” Ragland told CIO.com.

However, she added, security is only one area that requires more tech expertise. Another is “strategic opportunity.” In other words, “How are we using technology to advance our strategies, products, and customer engagements? As boards look to technology skills, they should look for someone who can bring both flavors into the board room.”

It’s also important to venture outside the boardroom, Ragland continued, to meet with members in more casual settings where they might absorb information differently than they do during, say, thrice-annual presentations.

“CIOs should find a few people with the highest technical acumen to meet in more conversational settings,” she said. “The chairs of the audit and risk committees are usually a good place to start, and CIOs can leverage their CEO to jumpstart those meetings.”

Mindsight delivers enterprise managed services to the mid-market across a variety of industries including manufacturing, financial services, government, education – just to name a few. Our solution architects and engineers are expert-level only and are an extension of your IT team. Mindsight is headquartered in Downers Grove, IL, a suburb of Chicago.