Your customers depend on you for privacy and data security, which is more important than ever as we’ve transitioned to remote work across all sectors. While your MSP team cannot physically monitor systems, assets, and people like you used to, you can enhance your security posture using tools like Liongard. Liongard supports the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework (as well as numerous other compliance standards) and can help you keep your customers’ data safe.
The NIST Framework provides voluntary guidance to better manage and reduce cybersecurity risk, and it represents the gold standard in our industry for IT security practices. In addition to protecting sensitive data, the benefits of adopting NIST’s Framework include:
- Standards for prioritizing actions to protect data
- Common-language criteria that everyone within your organization as well as your customers can understand
- Guidelines that apply to companies in nearly every industry
- Demonstrating your MSP’s maturity and dedication to ongoing risk mitigation
The five functions of NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework are: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover. You can think of each of these as tasks your team needs to carry out to keep your clients secure. Under each of these tasks are specific categories, or challenges, that your team needs to tackle — this is where Liongard can help.
Identify
Liongard’s automated documentation not only makes onboarding easier and eliminates stale data, it standardizes data collection for smarter asset management. It also gives you 24/7 deep visibility into systems and the ability to quickly assess risk across customers.
Protect
With Liongard working in the background, you gain living, breathing data that can be used to set up foundational security configurations. This data gives you a historical timeline and documented record of configurations across all systems in Liongard. You can monitor access control with fast user audits on critical systems like Office 365 and Active Directory. Maintenance issues become a breeze when you can pinpoint the data you need at a moment’s notice. Liongard also makes it easy to track firewall firmware versions and other protective technology to keep your systems secure and resilient.
Detect
Thanks to automated documentation, anomalies and events can be tracked down using Liongard’s timeline feature, which lets MSPs “rewind time” to view critical changes and answer the previously frustrating questions, “Who did what? And when?” In addition, Liongard allows your team to set up detection processes with Custom Actionable Alerts, which let your team alert on anything. With Liongard inspecting systems daily, it can support continuous security monitoring.
Respond
Set up alerts in Liongard to generate tickets automatically to your PSA, reducing the time spent digging for data and improving time to resolution. That means you stay on top of issues before they turn into fire drills, and you can confidently communicate to your customer how you worked proactively to minimize impact, underscoring your MSP’s value.
Recover
Liongard as a whole addresses the final function of the NIST framework: recovery. Using automation, alerts, key metrics, and historical data available in the platform, MSPs can use unified visibility to create a recovery plan built on proactive data management and efficient action to correct issues.
Adhering to the NIST framework for cybersecurity creates a foundation on which you can build trust with your customers. Whether you choose to employ the NIST Framework or simply use it to complement your current cybersecurity and risk management processes, it’s an industry standard that can be followed to enhance your security practices and give your customers peace of mind.
For more ways Liongard supports the NIST framework, check out our webinar, Building a Strong Security Foundation. You can also visit our Trust Center for a complete view of our compliance and transparency standards.
Michelle Sawa is director of product research at Liongard. Read more Liongard guest blogs here.
