In a recent blog post, we explained the benefits of a managed help desk. When it comes to cybersecurity and protecting your data, a managed help desk provides additional benefits. Cyberattacks and ransomware are becoming more common, and sometimes even the best internal IT team can experience limitations when it comes to these threats. Here are three ways a managed help desk and cybersecurity work together.
The automation and AI of a managed help desk makes your business safer.
Did you know that a lot of help desk work can simply be resetting passwords for employees? While this is important, it can take away time from other critical IT tasks and issues. A managed help desk can use automation and AI to prioritize tickets so that low-level tasks like password resets don’t come ahead of critical tasks like checking on security threats. With this kind of service, we see that employees are secure and that IT professionals within a company have more time for important issues like cybersecurity.
Have an operations center at your fingertips.
With a managed help desk, you can have an operations center supporting your team. A Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors a network for failures and outages. A Security Operations Center (SOC) is going to be more focused on the cybersecurity end of monitoring, with a higher level of support. A SOC can continually monitor, detect, analyze, and combat threats to your network and business. Some SOCs can offer NOC capabilities, so make sure to understand which functions you have, and what the provider is offering.
A managed help desk can help you identify security threats.
A managed help desk can help your IT team identify holes in your network. Most services are recurring (where they charge for on-going services) or a break-fix. However, they can also engage in a special project where they figure out where the weakness are in your security and how to fix them.This can include helping identify what your employees don’t know, how to fix those holes, how to proactively ward off potential bad activity, and a plan remediation after you’ve been hit.
External support can help in a crisis.
The unfortunate (but no longer unthinkable) happens: you experience a security breach. Whether someone is holding your information ransom or has simply installed bad software, you are going to need help either recovering your data or re-installing from backups, not to mention investigating how the breach occurred. The reality is that this is often too much work for an internal IT team to handle in addition to their normal workload, no matter how smart or talented they are. A managed IT help desk can continue to assist with everyday tasks, while your team focuses on the crisis.
24/7 support means someone is always there to help.
The reality of work-from-home and hybrid workplaces is that employees are working all the time, from many different places. This might mean that they need assistance with a technology problem when the regular IT staff can’t assist them. Managed help desk services can be available 24/7/365, offering your employees the assistance they need, wherever they are, whenever they need it. When it comes to preventing cyber attacks, this 24/7 support can be especially important. For one, some help desk services offer monitoring so that they can see a problem before an employee might. They can also respond immediately to threats that might arise after business hours.
If you are considering managed help desk services, contact us today. Using our RFP Alternative process, we can help you figure out what services you need to augment your existing help desk or IT team, and how the managed IT help desk can work together with the cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery plans you already have in place.