RE: Best practices for outsourcing firewall management

["Melson, Paul" <PMelson () sequoianet com>]

>  -----Original Message-----
> Are you suggesting that it is a more feasible approach to have the
> ISP/telco/hosting provider simply responsible for "facilities" (aircon, UPS,
> bandwidth, backups?, spares for certain hardware (routers, cache-proxies,
> etc) ), and leave the MSSP to be responsible for managing (implementing and
> reviewing) security devices such as firewalls, IDS, etc, which would also
> include being responsible for replacing firewall and ids hardware as
> necessary?

Yes, at least it's something worth considering.  I'm not familiar with the
specifics of the equipment and facilities involved, so there may be logistical
issues that complicate this for the customer.  

Assuming that they outweigh any complications I may be unaware of, the advantages
straightforward.  Management, implementation, review, and support are all handled
by trusted experts.  There is no middle-man between the MSSP and the systems they
are responsible for.  (This is a good thing, since MSSP's are typically not in the
business of managing their competitors.)  This also has the added benefit of
reducing response time to outages and change requests (a common customer complaint
in this arena), as well as the potential for reducing costs since you're not paying
for two layers of the same service.

PaulM
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