Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

A Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) in cybersecurity is a third-party organization that remotely manages and secures a client’s IT systems, networks and data. MSSPs provide cybersecurity services, including threat monitoring, incident response and compliance support. By outsourcing these functions, organizations can improve their security posture and reduce the burden on internal teams without requiring a large in-house security operations team.

LevelBlue has been named the Growth and Innovation Leader in the Frost Radar: Managed Security Services in the Americas, 2026 report, a recognition that reflects our continued focus on helping organizations simplify cybersecurity operations, strengthen resilience, and navigate an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Cybersecurity has moved from isolated tools to continuous operations. Most environments already generate alerts and logs across systems, yet attacks still progress undetected. The problem is not visibility but the speed at which teams can detect, understand, and respond to threats. The gap is not caused by a lack of tools but by limited execution capacity. This is where managed security services providers (MSSPs) come in. Modern attacks increasingly rely on identity misuse and legitimate system tools.

AI tools are moving faster than the security controls meant to govern them.In this episode of Defender Fridays, Cisco's Cybersecurity Technical Solutions Architect Katherine McNamara walks through changes in the threat landscape as organizations rush to integrate AI without applying basic security discipline. When Katherine meets with customers to discuss AI security, the conversation almost always starts and ends in the same place: data leakage. Someone might upload sensitive files to a public LLM.

Every new customer shouldn't cost you headcount. But with stack diversity, it usually does.

Every MSSP is fielding the same question from clients right now:"Are we safe with AI?" Most are answering with some version of"yes, we're logging everything." In a recent Defender Fridays episode, Saurabh Shintre, Founder and CEO of Realm Labs drew a hard line between these two concepts."You can log prompt and response and this bare minimum you have to do.

For managed security service providers (MSSPs), customer loyalty is the most critical indicator of business health. Unlike other metrics that you directly control, such as mean time to respond or mean time to detect, it can’t be gamed: customers will either stay with you or they’ll churn. This means that the top priority for any MSSP should be to deliver the specific customer outcomes they were hired to provide, like helping to stop threat actors before they cause damage.