Quick answer: The cybersecurity shared responsibility model means protecting your company is split between your managed security service provider (MSSP), your internal IT team, your business leaders and your employees. An MSSP typically owns 24/7 monitoring, threat detection and response. Your organization still owns risk tolerance, access decisions, data priorities, employee behavior and business decisions during an incident.
For many small and mid-size companies, outsourcing cybersecurity to a managed security service provider (MSSP) can feel like handing over the keys. You have a security operations center monitoring your environment 24/7. Security experts are watching for threats. Vulnerabilities are being identified. Alerts are being investigated. Tools are being managed. Maybe your MSSP is even handling incident response when something goes wrong.
So, who is responsible for cybersecurity? The answer is: everyone. Even when you outsource some or most of your cybersecurity operations to an MSSP, responsibility for protecting your company doesn’t disappear. It shifts and becomes shared between your internal team, your technology providers, your employees, and your security partner.
This is the essence of the cybersecurity shared responsibility model. And understanding where your responsibility begins and ends is one of the most important and often overlooked aspects of an effective cybersecurity strategy.
Does outsourcing cybersecurity outsource accountability?
No. Outsourcing cybersecurity doesn’t outsource accountability. An MSSP can provide the expertise, technology, processes and around-the-clock monitoring that many organizations would struggle to build internally. But no third party can completely take ownership of the business decisions that determine how an organization manages risk.
Think of it like hiring a security company to protect your office building. The security company can monitor cameras, patrol the property, respond to alarms and investigate suspicious activity. But someone inside the company still needs to decide who should have access to the building, which areas require additional protection, and what to do if a critical system is compromised.
Cybersecurity works much the same way. Your MSSP may monitor your environment and identify a suspicious login. But your organization still needs to determine whether that employee should have access to the system, whether the account should be disabled, and what business impact could result from the incident.
Outsourcing security operations doesn’t mean outsourcing security decisions.
What does an MSSP actually own?
The exact division of responsibilities will vary based on the services you purchase and the terms of your agreement. But an MSSP will typically take responsibility for some combination of:
- 24/7 security monitoring and alerting
- Security information and event management (SIEM)
- Threat detection and response (managed detection and response)
- Security operations center (SOC) services
- Endpoint detection and response
- Threat hunting
- Vulnerability identification and prioritization
- Security technology management
- Security investigations
- Incident response support
- Security reporting and recommendations
- Threat intelligence
These capabilities can dramatically improve your security posture, particularly for companies that don’t have the resources to maintain a large internal security team. But they represent only one side of the equation.
What remains your responsibility when you outsource cybersecurity?
Your organization remains responsible for the things an MSSP cannot and should not decide for you.
1. Defining acceptable risk
Your MSSP can identify risks. It can explain the severity of a vulnerability. It can recommend remediation. But your business has to decide how much risk it is willing to accept. For example, an MSSP may identify a vulnerability affecting an application that is critical to your business. Fixing it could require downtime, an application upgrade or significant investment. The security provider can explain the risk and recommend an appropriate response. But business leadership ultimately needs to decide how that risk fits within the organization’s priorities and risk tolerance. A formal security framework assessment can help leadership set that tolerance.
2. Controlling access
Identity and access management is another area where responsibilities overlap. Your security provider may monitor authentication activity and flag unusual behavior. It may identify dormant accounts or excessive privileges. But you determine who should have access to critical systems in the first place. When an employee changes roles or leaves the company, someone internally needs to ensure access is modified or revoked. Your MSSP can help detect problems, but it cannot know every organizational change unless you communicate it.
3. Managing employees
Technology can prevent many attacks. It cannot eliminate human risk. Employees still need to recognize phishing attempts, protect credentials, use approved applications and follow security policies. Security awareness training can reduce risk, and an MSSP can help deliver or manage that training. But creating a culture where employees understand that cybersecurity is part of their job remains an organizational responsibility. Every employee is effectively part of your security perimeter.
4. Protecting data
Your MSSP can help monitor your environment, but your organization needs to know what data matters most.
- Where is sensitive information stored?
- Who can access it?
- How long should it be retained?
- What happens if it is compromised?
These are business questions as much as technology questions. Without clear answers, even sophisticated security tools may be protecting the wrong things or protecting important assets without the appropriate level of priority.
5. Making decisions during an incident
An MSSP can detect and investigate a security incident and may take predefined containment actions. But what happens next often requires business leadership. Should a system be taken offline? Should customers be notified? Should law enforcement be contacted? Do you need to activate your business continuity plan? Are regulatory or contractual notification requirements triggered? An MSSP can provide expertise and support, but leadership ultimately owns the business decisions.
What is the biggest mistake companies make with an MSSP?
The biggest mistake is assuming “someone else is watching.” One of the risks of outsourcing cybersecurity is creating a false sense of security. You may think “We have an MSSP, so someone is taking care of security.” That mindset can create dangerous gaps.
Security monitoring doesn’t compensate for an unpatched critical application. Threat detection doesn’t eliminate excessive user privileges. A SOC can’t protect a company from an employee sharing credentials. And no security provider can respond effectively to an incident it doesn’t know about. The strongest MSSP relationships therefore aren’t “set it and forget it.” They are partnerships built around clearly defined responsibilities, communication and accountability.
How to build a cybersecurity responsibility matrix
One practical way to eliminate ambiguity is to create a cybersecurity responsibility matrix. For every major security capability, you should identify the owners. Here is an example:
| Security responsibility | MSSP | Internal team | Business |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24/7 threat monitoring | Own | Support | — |
| Security alert investigation | Own | Support | — |
| User provisioning | Support | Own | Approve |
| Access decisions | Advise | Support | Own |
| Vulnerability prioritization | Advise/Own | Support | Approve |
| Patch deployment | Support | Own | — |
| Security awareness | Support | Support | Own |
| Incident containment | Own/Support | Support | Decision |
| Business continuity | Support | Support | Own |
| Regulatory/customer notification | Advise | Support | Own |
The specific assignments will differ from company to company. The important thing is that there are no blank spaces. If nobody clearly owns a responsibility, it is a security gap waiting to happen.
The MSSP should make you stronger, not less accountable
The real value of an MSSP isn’t that it allows a company to stop thinking about cybersecurity. It’s that it gives the organization access to capabilities that would otherwise be difficult, expensive or impossible to build internally. A mature MSSP like Dataprise can provide specialized expertise, continuous monitoring, threat intelligence, advanced security technologies and experienced responders. It can augment an internal IT team through co-managed IT and provide security depth around the clock.
But the best relationships operate as an extension of your organization, not as a replacement for organizational accountability. Your MSSP should understand your business. Your internal IT team should understand the security program. Your leadership team should understand the organization’s most significant cyber risks. And employees should understand their role in protecting the company. That’s what a true shared responsibility model looks like.
Why is cybersecurity a team sport?
Cybercriminals don’t care which part of your organization owns a particular security control. They exploit the weakest link. That could be a vulnerable server, an overprivileged account, an untrained employee, a misconfigured cloud environment or a process nobody realized they were responsible for.
An MSSP can significantly strengthen your defenses, but cybersecurity ultimately remains a team sport. The goal isn’t to determine who gets the blame when something goes wrong. The goal is to make sure everyone knows what they are responsible for before something goes wrong. Because outsourcing cybersecurity can give you more expertise, more visibility and more resources. It shouldn’t give you less accountability.
5 cybersecurity shared responsibility best practices to act on now
- Stay informed. Be aware and regularly informed (monthly/quarterly) of new threats in your environment and industry.
- Review access and privileged accounts at least quarterly.
- Maintain a current asset inventory.
- Tie cybersecurity to business risk.
- Document and test your responsibility matrix. (Suggested addition — the original lists only four.) Review who owns each control with your MSSP at least annually and after major changes, and test it in a tabletop exercise.
Ready to put a clear shared responsibility model in place? Talk to Dataprise about managed cybersecurity.
