Firewall system health monitoring and alerting

Service and incident management

Software lifecycle management (updates, patches, etc.)

Security policy implementation, reporting, analysis and remediation

System vulnerability checks and security reviews

Network traffic monitoring

Greater expertise: Providers will generally have experts in your preferred hardware and software already on staff, speeding implementation.

Reduced staff burden: Outsourced providers maintain their own certifications and trainings, and they take over all equipment and software updates. This allows your team to focus on more strategic areas that can add greater value to the organization.

Faster incident response: Service-level agreements (SLAs) can ensure immediate incident response without adding additional organizational head count or off-hour team load.

Proactive security: MSPs typically devote significant attention to threat intelligence monitoring in order to adjust your protection as events and updates warrant. Doing so takes the burden off of your internal team.

Reduced update burden: Hardware, software, and firmware updates are time-consuming chores. MSPs will keep your equipment up to date and save your team time.

Improved manufacturer support: MFW providers often have direct manufacturer connections due to the volume of devices they operate. For an organization that may not have a large volume of equipment, an MSP may be able to improve issue resolution.

Easier scale: Growing organizations may be able to scale their protection more quickly and more cost-effectively using an MFW provider by eliminating hiring and equipment purchase processes.

Improved backup and recovery: An MFW provider will often have access to significant backup and recovery resources (including on-call staff) that can result in faster restore times than internal resources.

Compliance expertise: Industries with complex regulatory and/or data-handling requirements such as healthcare or payment processing can often use an MFW provider with regulated industry experience.

Small size: Organizations with smaller budgets, lower traffic volumes, or more streamlined networks may find managing their firewalls internally is more cost effective.

Strict data access requirements: Organizations with strict compliance and data security may find that the liability of individuals from outside the organization potentially accessing sensitive data is too great. Public companies, for example, may find that providers accessing logs represent a privileged disclosure.

Security context: If your organization runs particularly complex operations, or is subject to novel attacks, an outsourced provider may not have enough context regarding your internal infrastructure to understand the severity level of alerts they are seeing.

Knowledge loss: Network security is an important IT function. If you fully outsource your firewall with the intent of reducing staff, your organization may lose significant internal capabilities knowledge.