If you’re like most MSP executives, you sometimes get caught between a rock and a hard place when explaining to clients why their off-the-shelf cybersecurity solutions aren’t enough protection in today’s threat environment. Detailing all the ways your clients are vulnerable can overwhelm them and lead them to think that adequate protection is out of reach – either technologically or financially (or both).
Why you need a partner that’s a single-source provider
The key to success is to simplify with a scalable partner who acts as a single-solution provider that can deliver layered and comprehensive cyber resilience solutions under a single, unified umbrella. The benefits are many:
- Arming your clients with heavyweight power. As relentless and creative as cybercriminals can be, their fragmented, in-the-shadows nature cannot scale against a global cyber resilience provider. Especially if they bring a holistic overview of the worldwide threat landscape, adaptive threat intelligence and real-time defense hardening as threats are uncovered or suspected.
- Rapid client recovery if the bad guys get lucky. If the cybercrooks do happen to lay a glove on your clients, they can absorb the blow or rebound quickly in a unified and coordinated effort.
- Vital access to diverse security and resilience expertise. The threat landscape is vast and diverse, with threats emerging and evolving daily. Nobody can be an expert in all of them. The ability to turn to your provider partner’s team for advice and expertise for any client circumstance doesn’t exist when you rely on piecemeal solutions.
- The ability to scale with you and your clients. Only a full-service cyber resilience partner can scale with you and your clients holistically, whether that’s scaling solution-by-solution, scaling up internationally or scaling up with client locations and infrastructure.
- The backing you need to scale your cyber resilience practice. Working with multiple vendors is time-consuming and frustrating. The practical solution for growing your cyber resilience practice is a single-source partner you can rely on for anything you or your clients need.
Finding the right partner
Cyber resilience is a high-stakes game. Bad guys want to steal your clients’ data, shut down their operations and extort money from them. This means the provider you choose to partner with is the most crucial decision you’ll make when building your cyber resilience practice. The four most vital traits to look for are:
- Channel commitments. As MSPs have long learned the hard way, it doesn’t matter how good a provider’s solutions are if it approaches the channel half-heartedly. Pick a provider with excellent channel support and commitments.
- Killer solutions. The war between the world’s businesses and cybercriminals is a clash of technology and innovation. The provider partner you choose should be able to go toe-to-toe with criminals across the tech spectrum, including artificial intelligence and machine learning.
- Training and education. Given that cyberattacks targeting humans have been wildly successful over the past two years, security awareness training is as essential to client protection as any software solution.
- Global scale. Since cyberthreats are borderless and move at the speed of light, you need your provider partner to have a global reach. This is true even if you don’t plan to serve international clients.
The Bottom Line
Leveraging a single provider with unified products, infrastructure and expertise across the cyber resilience spectrum can give your clients an edge over cybercriminals. But like all aspects of the MSP business, your ability to help your clients and grow your business is only as good as your provider partner.