Leading UK cloud distributor urges MSPs to balance effective cybersecurity with smart business financial decisions.
As UK businesses continue to struggle with their cybersecurity needs, it has become increasingly apparent that the cause is a decline in board-level responsibility. The Department for Science, Information and Technology’s (DSIT) Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 has recently highlighted that over four in ten businesses (43%) have experienced a cybersecurity breach or attack in the last 12 months, with the most disruptive breaches averaging £3,500 – a figure potentially underestimating the full financial impact of a cyberattack.
While phishing remained the most prevalent reported vector of attack, increasingly sophisticated methods such as AI impersonation were found to be becoming more mainstream. C-suite responsibility for cybersecurity, however, was seen to have steadily declined among businesses since 2021, despite the potential business costs associated with ransomware attacks.
With the UK government’s recent proposals for the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, firms providing essential IT services to public services and the broader economy will be required by law to meet robust cybersecurity standards and provide a more comprehensive range of risk assessments to help identify potential threats. Promising to affect UK managed service providers (MSPs) by bringing them directly under government oversight for the first time, finding real-time, efficient ways to prevent breaches and financial damages is now urgently required.
Mark Appleton, chief customer officer for ALSO Cloud UK, urges UK MSPs to invest in advanced exposure management tools to prevent malicious cyber threats from causing further business damage.
“Providing outsourced IT services, such as infrastructure management, security monitoring and applications support, will now be regulated. Therefore, ensuring that your cybersecurity standards and technical controls, as well as incident reporting and supply chain risk management tools, are all compassing is an essential stage of preparing for increased regulation.”
“For many UK MSPS, it’s not even just a matter of how much to upgrade, as they lack the visibility to see what currently isn’t meeting new standards. How can you hope to upgrade systems when you don’t know what’s behind?”
“Endpoints are priority targets, accounting for 70% of successful breaches, as organisations onboard even more new entry points. Cloud misconfigurations account for 15% of initial attack vectors, ensuring threats spiral further across compromised cloud environments. Managing exposure to threats across endpoints, networks, cloud-based applications and data, and other digital assets is essential to keep costs down but needs to be done continuously lest MSPs open themselves or clients to attack.”
Appleton outlines that continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) is the key to modern cybersecurity and is essential to any MSP’s toolbelt.
“Meeting new regulatory demands requires a more expansive exposure management strategy. This involves more proactively identifying, assessing and mitigating vulnerabilities to reduce an organisation’s attack surface and strengthen its security posture against evolving threats.
“For CISOs also pressed with budgeting, implementing a cybersecurity project that can achieve their security goals with limited resources poses further challenges. CTEM tools can align alongside cybersecurity maturity assessments to match business objectives, involving greater collaboration across different departments, so that any security strategy is built from specific network specifications and how teams work individually and as a whole.”
“Ultimately, an exposure management program enables greater prioritising of threat mitigation relative to business context, and security teams to make more data-driven decisions. This can also be used to estimate and justify cost savings for mitigation – exposure management systems can highlight the potential ransomware costs, weighed against the costs to mitigate. By including legal fees, compliance penalties and customer attrition as key factors contributing to the total financial impact of an incident, business leaders gain greater clarity as to just how costly a security failure can be.”
Appleton concludes: “Exposure management has become vital for organisations in giving them a greater understanding of their different attack paths and threat surfaces, helping them build a stronger cyber resilience program with mitigation tied to business-critical assets. As the cost of a breach varies depending on an organisation’s cyber posture, maturity level and size, a single unpatched exploitable vulnerability can quickly escalate into a full-scale breach.
“The right CTEM can work to your business needs, providing insight into what you need to fix so CISOs can build a strong business case to upgrade where needed. This becomes even more powerful for MSPs to roll out across technology stacks; thus, exposure management tools must be an essential part of any MSP offering top-quality cybersecurity threat detection and monitoring.”
Further information can be found at https://also.com.
Be First to Comment