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Hiring a company to manage cybersecurity services – known as a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) – is a strategic move many businesses make to level the playing field against increasingly complex digital threats to their operations. Many organizations believe they are too small to be targeted, when, in reality, the smaller companies are the very ones attackers target, often representing a weak link, the back-door into a bigger, wider network. With cyberattacks on the rise, this is a topic that mustn’t be ignored. But what does using an MSSP offer over internally managing your own digital security? This article will break down and explain the current landscape, threats to business, and why paying for the services of an MSSP could become the smartest investment your company ever makes.

Access to Expertise

These days, many companies outsource their more specialized roles to dedicated third-party service providers. They do this because, not only is it expensive to try and employ personnel for every kind of role needed within a business, but it’s also a very competitive marketplace, and the last thing you want as an organization is to spend valuable time and resources competing to recruit for roles that aren’t core to what your company does. This is perhaps most true when it comes to cybersecurity services, which is such a highly specialized growth industry that demand outstrips available talent by some distance.

By using a dedicated security service to manage your needs, you will benefit from the specialized knowledge of an entire team of experts that covers far more than any generalist you might look to employ internally. From forensics to cloud security and threat hunting, the scope offered by a specialized management service far outweighs what you would get for the same monthly cost internally by comparison.

Not only this, but you will also benefit from the collective intelligence that an MSSP can impart because they will be managing hundreds of clients like you, which means they can understand the wider landscape and see early warning trends across industries; something you wouldn’t be able to do on your own.

Vigilance Around the Clock

Because hackers don’t work 9-to-5, often attacking businesses on weekends or during holidays, it pays to have around-the-clock monitoring. An MSSP provides this through a Security Operations Center (SOC) that watches your network every minute of every day.

Not only will they alert your business to an issue right when it happens, but they can often take immediate action, such as isolating a compromised computer at 3 a.m. to avoid a wider breach of your system.

The Threat Landscape

As we mentioned, size has no bearing on the company’s hacker target. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite: Attackers now actively target the weakest link in a supply chain, and this is often the smallest company or organization. A small-to-medium-sized company with insufficient cybersecurity services in place represents the ideal back-door entry point for attackers, gaining them access to the larger organizations up the chain. Those larger organizations might likely be your customers, which isn’t good for business.

If you’re a small business, you are a target. In fact, a business falls victim to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds, with 43% of all cyber-attacks targeting small organizations, of which only 14% have adequate defenses in place to weather the storm.

The human factor plays a big part too, with 68% of all breaches involving a human element, such as phishing via email, stolen credentials, or simple errors by staff. People will always make mistakes, and this is where the 24/7 monitoring that cybersecurity services provide really comes into its own.

The Financial Impact of an Attack

The net cost of a security breach on a company isn’t just a line item on a balance sheet; it’s a potential business-ending event of disastrous proportions.

Indeed, approximately 60% of small companies go out of business within 6 months of a significant cyber-attack, and it takes an average of 241 days to identify and contain a breach internally.

With the average global cost of a data breach in 2025 at $4.44 million, and a staggering $10.22 million in the United States alone, a monthly payment to an MSSP becomes a vital outlay you cannot afford not to make.

The Cost-Efficiency

For most small-to-mid-size companies, the cost of building a dedicated in-house security team is prohibitively expensive. By outsourcing to an MSSP, not only do you drastically reduce that cost, but you also avoid the associated and ongoing costs of recruitment, employee benefits, sickness, and ongoing training, leaving it all to the external experts. Likewise, the tools of the trade are also very expensive, with sophisticated security software such as SIEMs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing. With an MSSP, these enterprise-grade costs are shared amongst all clients, making the whole proposition way less expensive for each company using their services.

Compliance and Legalities

Increasingly, many industries, such as those in the healthcare, finance, and government contracting sectors, are legally required to meet data security standards like HIPAA, GDPR, or SOC2. Indeed, many government contracts are only available for tender to organizations meeting all of the requirements and standards for digital security. Failure to meet these security standards means you won’t be able to even bid on these government contracts.

MSSPs specialize in keeping all of the detailed logs and documentation required to satisfy external auditors that full legal compliance is being adhered to. Using a professional security agency will limit liability, often reducing cyber insurance premiums, because insurers view businesses with an MSSP in place as being of lower overall risk.

Strategic Focus

Clearly, the management of firewalls, security protocols, and associated “false alarms” is a huge time-sink for internal IT departments within organizations. MSSPs filter out the noise, ending the fatigue of remaining constantly vigilant that personnel would otherwise suffer from.

By offloading the cyber defense of the business to a third-party, your company is free to continue with what it does best: to evolve and grow its products and services. Reducing the opportunity cost associated with security tasks that are ultimately not what your organization exists for is one of the smartest moves you can make.

Using the services of an MSSP might just be the single best investment your company makes in the coming years, and quite possibly one you can’t afford not to make.

To learn more about how our cybersecurity services could benefit your Houston-based business, contact Stargel Office Solutions today.