What if Your Security Service Provider Can No Longer Support You?

Security service providers offer a whole range of essential services that protect businesses and individuals from threats.

But what would you do if your security provider could no longer support you?

This is a question most organisations prefer not to think about, yet it’s exactly the scenario that exposes the difference between operational resilience and blind trust.

Don’t assume you’re always protected

Too many businesses assume their monitoring will always be available, their alerts will always be triaged, and their incidents will always be handled by someone on the other end of the phone. But what happens if monitoring suddenly stops? Would your business still be able to meet its regulatory obligations and could you restore protection before attackers notice that a gap has appeared?

Imagine your managed detection and response (MDR) service provider vanishing without warning. How quickly could you regain full visibility across your estate? How would you reestablish event collection, correlation, threat detection, and response actions? If your security operations centre (SOC) went dark at two in the morning, who would receive the critical alert? More importantly, who would act on it?

Regulatory expectations are clear

These aren’t hypothetical worries. Changing your MDR provider presents genuine operational risks - and regulators have shown little sympathy for organisations that fail to plan for service disruption.

Regulatory expectations are clear across every sector. NIS2 requires continuous monitoring, rapid detection, and effective response. Any interruption to SOC coverage places you in immediate non-compliance and removes your ability to demonstrate control. DORA raises the bar even higher for financial entities, insisting on uninterrupted security operations and resilience across outsourced services. A monitoring gap isn’t simply a service problem - it’s a regulatory breach and a risk to customer trust.

Data protection law reinforces the point

GDPR and the ICO have both linked delayed detection to greater impact, broader exposure, and higher liability. If visibility drops, so does your ability to contain an incident. The longer an attacker remains undetected, the more severe the consequences become.

For regulated industries, the expectations are even stricter. The FCA and PRA require operational resilience and continuity of critical business functions. Losing your SOC, even temporarily, reflects an immediate failure to maintain essential services. Critical national infrastructure bodies in energy, water, transport, and healthcare operate under frameworks that treat uninterrupted monitoring as the baseline for safe operation. The message is consistent…

You can’t rely on a single provider without a clear plan for failure

If you’re not fully prepared for your provider to fail, you’re already carrying risk. A smooth transition to a new managed detection and response capability isn’t something you can improvise during a crisis. It requires preparation, documentation, and a clear understanding of what must continue working even when your current provider cannot.

The power of a transition checklist

A transition checklist gives you the structure to assess where you stand today and what you must improve before a disruption forces your hand. It helps you map your assets, data flows, integrations, response processes, contractual obligations, and fallback plans. It guides you through validating log sources, confirming alert use cases, securing access, maintaining evidence handling, and preparing an alternative operational model should the worst happen.

Resilient organisations plan for continuity

They ensure that visibility never depends on a single point of failure. They prepare before the outage, not after it.

Speaking as someone who has supported clients through some of their worst moments, I can affirm that a checklist isn’t a nice to have – it’s essential. I’ve seen organisations freeze when their monitoring has suddenly stopped, and when they’re unable to answer basic questions about log sources, escalation paths, or who actually has the keys to the platform. In the middle of a crisis, people assume these details exist somewhere, only to discover that their MDR held all the knowledge and nothing was documented internally.

When you’re on a call in the early hours, trying to rebuild visibility during an active threat, you quickly realise which organisations have planned for failure and which ones just hoped it would never happen. The ones with a clear transition plan regain control within hours. Those without often spend days catching up, all while attacks are still in progress.

A good checklist is a lifeline. It gives you clarity when everything else feels uncertain and ensures you’re never entirely dependent on a single provider. Having seen the consequences up close, I can say with confidence that the time to prepare is before the crisis, not during it.