Building A Next-Gen Managed Security Practice

By Scott Barlow, Vice President, Global MSP, Sophos

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have long served as their customers’ IT security experts. Small- and medium-sized businesses typically do not have the IT expertise or resources in-house, and so rely on their MSPs to provide the high level of IT support they could not create on their own. As the security landscape evolves and becomes more complex, MSPs also find themselves managing multiple vendors for different product areas, from endpoint security, email, disk encryption, network and mobile security, and wireless capabilities. It’s a time-consuming process that complicates billing and cash flow issues, but also provides MSPs with new opportunities to grow their businesses and even transition from being their customers’ IT reseller to their virtual CIOs. This requires cooperation on the parts of both the MSP and its vendor partners. The next-gen MSP must align its security strategy with vendors and demand that vendors become more integrated into its vendor ecosystem. This includes developing and providing a centralized management dashboard and other tools the MSP need to differentiate themselves from competitors and improve its customers’ security postures.

The evolving security landscape

Advancements in hardware, software and user needs continue to alter the workflow and IT security landscape. Security has become all the more complex, and so too has the knowledge-base MSPs must have at their disposal. Small businesses are enthusiastic adopters of cloud- and web-based resources. For the MSP, this means its clients are no longer tied to one machine, one server, one location, and the corresponding IT security needs of those clients have increased accordingly.