
Five Best Practices for an Incident Response Plan
Use these five best practices to create or update an IT security incident response plan.
It bears repeating: you can never have too much IT security. The problem is many organizations often don’t have enough ─ or at least not enough of the right kind. That includes best practice IT security strategies such as:
Limited staffing, budget constraints, lack of in-house security expertise, competing priorities, and other factors are usually to blame. It's not an easy situation to rectify. Building an internal security operations center (SOC) would be an optimal solution, but isn’t realistic for many companies.
There’s the challenge of properly defining the SOC operating structure and model to make the right staffing decisions. Competition is fierce for security experts with the required skillsets, education, and experience. Researching, selecting, implementing, and managing the appropriate tools and technologies take time and money.
One option is to employ managed security services, specifically security advisory services. US Signal is among the cloud services providers that offers these resources. Customers can take advantage of the knowledge and expertise of US Signal’s SOC team on an as-needed basis for a variety of security-related services.
Doing so can help organizations create and implement defense-in-depth, zero-trust security and other strategies to best meet their IT security needs. The following is an overview of what’s available and how contracting for the services works.
A service agreement, with an accompanying SOW, is developed that outlines the specific service or services to be performed and the relevant pricing. While every customer engagement is different, pricing for US Signal’s security advisory services is usually based on an estimated number of hours and an hourly rate. In some cases, a one-time fee may be applicable for services such as policy development or the deployment of a security solution. Recurring augmentation services can be purchased on a month-to-month or annual term, with price breaks for annual agreements.
Procuring security advisory services offers many of the same advantages as contracting for managed security services in general. That includes freeing up internal IT resources for strategic initiatives and other responsibilities, improving the overall security posture, operating expenses instead of capital expenses, more predictable costs, and more. But what’s particularly beneficial about what US Signal offers is the flexibility.
Services can typically be customized to your specific needs. For example, if you want an in-depth review of your organization's current security posture, US Signal offers a variety of different assessments that can be conducted. Interested in building out a best practices-driven cybersecurity strategy without having to hire a chief information security officer? Use US Signal’s vCISO services to develop specific policies, design and build a security architecture, and more.
If your needs change, so can the services. Rather than selling you off-the-shelf IT security services, we take the time to understand your goals and business requirements – current and future. That enables us to help make the most suitable recommendations, build the most effective solutions and help you develop the most appropriate cybersecurity strategy.
You can learn more about specific US Signal’s security advisory services here, as well as take advantage of a wide variety of free cybersecurity resources from US Signal here. Or contact us for more details or to set up a consultation with one of our IT security experts.
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