One aspect of cyber resilience that isn’t discussed nearly enough is the reach of your resilience provider. There are two key reasons it’s essential – the ability for your MSP to scale and the ability for your clients to fight a global foe.

What You Need in a Provider Partner
There are three vital attributes you need in a provider partner to scale your resilience practice:

1. One-stop shop. Your provider partner needs to provide all the components necessary for cyber resilience under a single roof. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the efficacy gained when solutions across all cyber resilience layers are synced for instant intelligence and defense hardening (we’ll get to that in customer benefits). The ability to go to a single team for everything you need in your practice – sales and service support, repeatable operating processes in your own business that scale, etc. – is central to your ability to grow your MSP.
2. Channel experience and commitment. You don’t have time to bring your provider partner up on what MSPs need to thrive. And you certainly can’t afford to roll the dice on providers that are new to the space or have a love-hate history in the channel that raises questions about their long-term commitment to your practice. You need a partner that can take care of your business as well as your customers, so you are free to pursue new business and scale up.
3. Substantial scope and scale. There are three aspects of scope and scale that matter. First, your provider partner needs to have the financial and operational depth to support you as you grow. Second, which we’ve already touched on, your provider partner should be able to deliver everything you need to provide your customers with cutting-edge cyber resilience. Third, your provider needs to have a global reach. Without it, you can’t serve multinational businesses -- whether they’re already your bread and butter or you intend to move up-market.

Before we move on to benefits for your customers, let us point out that that last point about geographic reach also applies to all the other attributes. You need to be able to deliver, at scale, all the components of cyber resilience in multiple regions with reliable support from your provider partner. In other words, global reach isn’t just nice to have. It’s part and parcel of the whole thing.

Why Your Customers Need You to Have a Partner with Global Reach
The global nature of cyberthreats – and challenges stopping crooks at the source – has made cybercrime a growth industry. Working with a cyber resilience provider with global reach can help your clients better combat these threats by delivering two key benefits that can substantially improve their resilience:

• Nearby help. First, having global reach means you can confidently deliver regional support for multinational customers. Yes, that’s a benefit to your MSP, but primarily within the context of providing the cyber resilience protection and services your clients need at geographic scale. The partner you select directly impacts the service your customers receive.
• Global insight. Second, and it’s difficult to overstate the importance of this point, providers with global reach can instantly harden global defenses against threats that emerge anywhere in the world. Simply put, superior reach translates to superior threat intelligence, AI and ML-enhanced analysis, and, by extension, fewer incidents for your customers.  

The Bottom Line
When it comes to combatting cyberthreats, size really does matter. If you’re already serving multinational customers, a single-source provider with geographic scale can dramatically simplify your operations. But even if you haven’t taken the plunge into multination customers, partnering with a provider that can support you in that – and even help guide you in that process – can make a big difference. And in any case, your clients are better served by a provider with enough reach to provide better protection from global threats.