Time for a Change? What to Look for in Your Next MSSP

Establish a clear picture of your environment

Before the new provider takes responsibility, validate the estate they are inheriting.
That includes your infrastructure, cloud environments, endpoints, critical applications, network architecture, security tooling, vulnerabilities, privileged accounts and third-party dependencies. Documentation is useful, but if you can find concrete evidence, that is better for future decision-making.

Rationalise access

Provider access can extend into some of the most sensitive parts of your environment. Use the transition to identify every privileged and service account, review what access is genuinely required, remove dormant accounts, rotate credentials where appropriate and establish stronger controls around privileged access.
The incoming provider should receive the access it needs to do its job, rather than automatically inheriting everything the previous provider had.

Test resilience

Changing provider is a good point to challenge assumptions about recovery. What is backed up? Where is it stored? Who can access it? When was the last successful restore? How quickly could critical services be recovered?
Your new provider should be able to give you clear answers and take responsibility for maintaining that position.

Improve security visibility

Understand what is monitored, which logs are retained, how alerts are investigated and what happens when suspicious activity is identified.
A security platform alone does not provide effective detection. You need the people, processes and operational capability around it.

Clarify incident response

Before the first incident, establish who detects it, who investigates it, who escalates it and who leads the response.
Notification requirements, escalation routes, evidence preservation, containment and recovery responsibilities should all be understood before responsibility transfers.