Cyberthreats are tricky in ways most of your customers don’t realize – like the fact that the most advanced (and dangerous) phishing threats crop up from sites and URLs that are live for less than a day[CF1], rendering most phishing lists useless.

It’s the same with antivirus definitions, by the way. The time it takes for lists to be updated overnight is an eternity in cyber time. Anything less than real-time scanning, updates and protection is a wasted effort.

In other words, regardless of which types of cyber resilience solutions you deploy for your clients, and when and where they’re deployed, they’re only as good as the threat management solutions behind them. That means world-class threat intelligence. Here’s how to leverage it effectively in two easy steps:

1. Pick the best solution. The well-worn trope – courtesy of The Untouchables – that you don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight has legs for a reason: you don’t want to be outmatched. In today’s digital business sphere, it’s hard to imagine anything more apropos to this concept than cyberthreats. This is where the threat intelligence engine you deliver makes all the difference. Look for a solution that:

• Has a global reach - The IT and communication industries at large take great pride in how their networks have shrunk the world. But that reality cuts both ways. As people and products move closer, so do cyberthreats. A hacker in Canada can reach right into the desktop of a business user in Australia, and the same is true for any two locations you can name across the globe. The threat intelligence solution you deliver your clients needs to operate on that same scale – identifying known threats, anomalies and unknown threats from anywhere at any time. It’s a tall order, but some companies are up to it, scanning billions of IP addresses and URLs for a holistic map of the global threat landscape in real time.
• Proactively protects across threat and device types - Blanket protection from cyberthreats is a must. Arm your clients with threat intelligence that protects them on both fixed and mobile devices from malware, malicious web addresses and IPs, phishing, malicious malware and malicious files.
• Integrates with a full cyber resilience suite - Cyberthreats are complicated, which is why cyber resilience requires a layered approach[CF2]. Multivendor solutions invariably result in integration issues and finger-pointing. You want a single-vendor solution so you can fix customer problems fast. But beyond responsibility and response times, when you tap the best threat intelligence solution available, you want it available in all the layers that can benefit from it.
• Is supported by a channel-friendly provider - Your provider can make you the hero or the goat for your clients when it comes to cyber resilience. Pick one with a proven commitment to the former.

2. Have the (not so) hard discussion. Every simple solution on the market, including the boxed antivirus at the local electronics store, claims to maintain the most comprehensive library of known threats. The problem is that all threats begin as unknowns. Explain to your clients that machine-learning-based threat intelligence knows all the cyberthreats in existence but also protects them from those that have yet to be identified.

Other threat intelligence aspects that resonate with clients – provided you picked a solution capable of them – are real-time phishing protection and support for the new remote and hybrid workforces.