Cloud service providers, managed service providers (MSPs), and managed security service providers (MSSPs) are the three primary categories of external IT service providers organizations rely on to support and secure their infrastructure.
Service Providers
When we work with other companies to provide services for us, we call those service providers. There's a few different types of service providers that we need to be familiar with.
First is the cloud service provider, or CSP. The cloud service provider is a company that offers computing services in the cloud. This is really everything that we've already been talking about. Infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, or software as a service are all examples of services that we can purchase in the cloud. Those are cloud service providers.
We could even consider colocation as possibly being a cloud service provider, because often we call colocation a private cloud, something that we still control. So it's private, but it's not on premise.
But there are other models as well. There are managed service providers, or MSPs. They're providing remotely managed IT infrastructure and system services.
Let's set up a little scenario here. Let's say I want to create a hybrid system. I want on-premise equipment, I want colocation, and I want infrastructure as a service. Maybe I'm using AWS for this, maybe I'm using some other data center for this, and then I have a few services that are on site, that are on premise. So here we have some hybrid, which is great, because then I can do some failovers, and maybe I've just distributed these services.
But I'm managing all of this, and maybe I have a small team that can do the rollouts of these, but they don't have enough time to manage the off hours times — maybe I need somebody on call. So now I'm going to bring another company in to manage that side of it. Since I have them managing that side, they're going to be monitoring this system, and if something goes awry they're going to give us a call. So they're kind of the first line of defense. This is called a managed service provider.
It can look very different depending on our situation. Maybe I have the managed help desk, maybe it's the backup system. It could be really anything. But the point is we're going to have a contract that outlines what we are responsible for and what they are responsible for, and it'll all be outlined in this contract, and we call that a managed service provider.
There's also an MSSP, or managed security service provider. It's the same thing, it's a managed service provider, but it's specific to security. So it's a company that manages cybersecurity services for us.
What we have is this environment that we want to protect, and maybe we don't have all the in-house resources in order to have proper security in place. So we hire an MSSP to come in and manage the security of these environments. That's what an MSSP is.
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