Cybersecurity technology and service providers are shifting priorities to support current needs: In the short term, organizations will continue to prioritize situations related to remote work and business continuity.
But eventually, there will be an emergence of a phase of hybrid activity — one in which security teams both take care of their immediate needs and begin to resume limited support for longer-term or strategic cybersecurity imperatives.
It Is Time To Build The Future
Managed security service providers can use this period to solidify existing relationships and build new ones as trusted partners and influencers. To get there, there are some key areas to get focus on:
Invest in relationships. When customers look back on this era, they will remember the partners that stuck with them. When providers cannot build revenue, they can build relationships. Organizations will continue to adjust security models to the requirements of different markets and regulators, and providers can help them by offering guidance and best practices.
Anticipate customers’ needs. Understand the issues that security teams face to determine which products and services could best meet their needs. Security teams will be focused on supporting technology and security features — capabilities and services that are critical to their organizations’ operations, Advanced endpoint security for remote workers, access management and VPN project to support a workforce split between working from the office and working from home will be top priority.
Adjust approaches and technologies to address urgent problems. Opportunities to expand should sync with the areas in which organizations are accelerating their own projects, particularly maintaining security operations, mitigating the risk of threats reaching users and endpoints outside the perimeter, and implementing MFA to enable employees to continue working remotely.
Assess the portfolio. Times have changed. The solutions that a customer needs today may be different from when their first security stack was implemented, and it may need to shift as a result. After evaluating which products or services are likely to be more attractive in the recovery, managed security service providers can reorient their offering to support them.
In fact, MSSPs have a great opportunity to expand their service portfolio and now is the time for them to act and help their customers adopt, along with a Cloud-based MFA solution, an advanced and adaptive endpoint security for their remote workers that one day will be back to the corporate network.
WatchGuard Extends Their Cybersecurity Portfolio For Its Partners
However, most midsize MSPs and many MSSPs suffer the effects of the commoditization and the aggressive merger and acquisition (M&A) activity among providers in the sector, with decreasing margins, experiencing the continuous flight of customers to other MSSPs and SOCs.
These competitors offer advanced security services in the perimeter, network and on endpoints
themselves, based on economies of scale, proprietary technologies, and specialized resources, all which require a large initial investment.
They also lack visibility and experience in endpoint monitoring. Implementing an advanced and adaptive security model requires the perfect synchronization of technologies and experts in big data, machine learning, cybersecurity intelligence, and automated response and remediation tools, among many other things.
WatchGuard has recently added a full stack of endpoint-focused security solutions that allows their partners to solve these challenges and increase operational efficiency while extending their portfolio, from network to endpoint, data, applications and user access management, all delivered from the Cloud.
In the following eBook, WatchGuard wants to bring your attention to its full endpoint security offering, that covers everything from advanced endpoint security, vulnerability assessment and patch management to IT hygiene and sensitive data control tools.
Our endpoint security offering is based on a Cloud-native platform along with managed security services: the Zero-Trust Application Services and Threat Hunting Service, as they are the fastest and most cost-effective way to evolve your managed security services — no investment is required in proprietary technologies or expert support.
Guest blog courtesy of WatchGuard Technologies. Read more WatchGuard guest blogs here.
