How MSPs Can Boost Their Security Offerings

Businesses are desperate for cybersecurity offerings, and business owners often turn to you, the MSPs, for help. An MSP is the logical first choice to consult because you’re already handling the business’s IT. Unfortunately, the sophistication and growing number of cybersecurity threats mean that MSPs may not have the resources or expertise to stay current and offer their customers reliable and consistent security service.

Organizational cybersecurity needs have grown multifaceted and vast. The move to cloud-first services opens the door to several cybersecurity issues such as shadow IT and a larger, more complicated attack surface. Adding fuel to the fire, more compliance requirements have emerged to ensure organizations are securing these complex environments.

Despite the increased complexity, organizations want leaner tech stacks rather than loading up on point solutions and multiple vendors. Which is why an MSP is a good candidate for providing the cybersecurity services their clients want, but only if they can actually address these complicated issues.

However, some MSPs don’t have the trained cybersecurity personnel or services to fully serve their clients. The way to bridge this gap is to partner with a reliable MSSP whose services can be bundled into your own.

Cybersecurity challenges your customers are likely to face

As you may have noticed, your clients need more hand-holding than ever before. Even tech-savvy business owners might struggle to keep up with the sheer sophistication required to manage the variety of cybersecurity risks and threats. As we’ve seen, even huge companies that have invested heavily in their cybersecurity departments can fall prey to intelligently executed social engineering attacks, as occurred in the infamous Uber and Twitter hacks.

This adds another ramification because it means your average client doesn’t always have leaders with the cybersecurity expertise necessary to carry out their cybersecurity responsibilities. This knowledge gap often occurs either because the leader had no training or because the industry has moved so fast that the company has fallen behind. The net result is that your clients require far more attention than ever before.

Making matters worse, budgets for most businesses are often strapped. If they do have a cybersecurity team in place, it’s typically a small one.

The final challenge an MSP’s customer typically faces is the need to be cyber resilient for several reasons:

• To maintain compliance with new regulations, which is especially important in highly regulated sectors like finance and health.
• To keep their reputation and trust—few events can decimate a company’s public image like a massive data breach that could have been prevented.
• To be cyber secure as an essential value marker, whether in the eyes of a company’s customers, investors, or potential acquirers in an M&A deal.

Why an MSSP is the ideal MSP partner

Hoping to provide your customers with a single vendor, you might have considered sourcing different security vendors offering specialized services and then being your customer’s single point of contact. Unfortunately, that opens the door to you falling into the same trap as your customers—but on a larger scale.

Working with multiple cybersecurity service providers can be challenging. They’re more difficult to manage and integrate, and they create more paperwork. When you multiply the problem by multiple customers, you’re looking at a “solution” that can’t scale and will likely end up becoming the problem itself.

Imagine you have 10 customers reaching out about five different security problems one day, each addressed by one of three different vendors. That means you’ll need to:

• Engage in 10 different conversations (that’s 10 open tickets).
• Sift through the vendors to know which one is handling what.
• Play the middle man game of communication between multiple vendors and your clients

Instead of helping your customer, you’ve not only added complexity and inefficiency but also opened yourself to potential errors, ultimately resulting in a less-than-stellar performance. Even worse, if the ball drops and the client suffers more due to this inefficiency, you could face a canceled contract.

Here’s an alternative to the multiple-vendor solution, look for a comprehensive cybersecurity vendor—such as an MSSP that offers competitive rates to you as an MSP and top-quality service to your customers. By partnering with a reliable MSSP, you can serve your customers’ needs as a single vendor, without undertaking the vendor complexity issue yourself.

This will allow you to bridge the cybersecurity knowledge and service gap while increasing your average revenue per customer without needing to take on additional risk or make in-house investments.

Why SolCyber should be on your radar

Here’s what SolCyber can offer to an MSP.

• We provide proactive human-led cybersecurity services to companies of all sizes.
• Our team is available 24/7.
• We offer a simplified billing model, making it easier to onboard our services to your clients.
• We’re partnered with cyber insurance companies who are willing to provide coverage for our customers. Obtaining cyber insurance coverage has become increasingly difficult for companies that don’t have a comprehensive cybersecurity posture in place, such as the one offered by SolCyber, making this another value add to your clients.

The perennial shortage of cyber security personnel means that it’s not only harder to find qualified new hires, but those hires are usually more expensive. Even if your MSP takes on new cybersecurity personnel, it takes time to onramp and establish them so the value to your clients may be delayed.

MSPs excel at what they do. Although your customers might lump “cybersecurity” along with general IT services, effective MSPs know that cybersecurity is its own beast. By partnering with an expert MSSP such as SolCyber, you can focus on what you do best and let us take care of the cybersecurity aspect.

To learn more, check out our Howdy Partner Program.