Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are challenged to protect their customers while balancing effectiveness, efficiency, and driving business growth. Doing so requires a highly scalable platform that supports multi-tenant solutions while providing robust, single-pane-of-glass management and orchestration. Partnering with the right security vendor, is the key to MSSP success.
Why Businesses Turn to MSSPs
Robust cybersecurity is vital in today's business world as increasingly sophisticated attackers and an ever-growing number of risks challenge even the largest security teams. Indeed, we’re now seeing more automated opportunistic attacks, as well as highly targeted attacks – often leveraging AI for better identification and exploitation of vulnerabilities. The impact of these crippling attacks affects individuals and entire supply chains across critical infrastructure. Cloud adoption, work from anywhere and other manifestations of digital transformation expands the attack surface, creates more complexity and strains the ability of security teams to manage risks.
Business leaders are increasingly aware of these problems as high-profile attacks regularly make the national news, highlighting the risks. As these leaders and security buyers look for solutions, they discover that sophisticated threats, complexity and the cybersecurity skills are outpacing the ability of in-house solutions. Cybersecurity is not a DIY exercise, and many CISOs are now turning to MSSPs to augment their teams or to outsource their security requirements. Using an MSSP gives them access to new security technologies, advanced skillsets, and more predictable outcomes and costs.
The Need for a Platform-Based Approach to Consolidation
The legacy of best-in-class approaches has left many organizations with dozens of non-integrated security point products, multiple management consoles and an avalanche of alerts. While intuitively reasonable, these approaches lead to box sprawl and so much complexity that it creates gaps in visibility which makes it difficult to detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats. This is one of the main reasons why Gartner has forecasted that by 2025, 75% of large organizations will be actively pursuing a vendor consolidation strategy, up from approximately 25% today. MSSPs will follow suit to create more scalable services.
Centralized management and reporting, native multi-tenancy, extensive customization, advanced automation, and extensive third-party technology integrations are all key features required to support MSSPs. Additional logging and reporting capabilities also enable MSSPs to demonstrate service value to their customers. Most valuable, however, might be a platform's ability to integrate security and networking in such a way that network performance is not hindered by security, and security doesn't take a back seat to performance. This is where an offering like Fortinet's Security Fabric shines.
Fortinet's Security Fabric provides broad visibility and protection, integrated solutions, and automated self-healing networks with AI-driven security. Combining next-generation prevention, detection and response systems, intelligent network segmentation, and single-pane-of-glass orchestration, the Fortinet Security Fabric can adapt to an evolving network architecture all while seeing and responding to the most sophisticated threats.
Creating an Elastic and Agile Infrastructure
In today's world, businesses must be able to scale their networking and computing on demand with the assurance that their security is also synchronized for better outcomes and experiences. Therefore, as customers implement digital transformation initiatives, MSSPs must evolve their portfolios to align with the agile infrastructure and application delivery models such as hybrid multi-clouds and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
The demand for Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) certainly applies to the MSSP market. Customers are increasing demanding consumption-based pricing models with no up-front investment requirements. By partnering with vendors that offer subscription-based service offerings, MSSPs can benefit from automated licensing, provisioning, metering, and billing with a turn-key deployment. This enables MSSPs to accelerate time-to-market and revenue recognition.
Strategically Partner with Fortinet
It’s little wonder that with Fortinet's multi-tenant capabilities, customizable centralized management, hyperscale performance, and platform flexibility, many of the industry’s leading carrier MSSPs rely on the Fortinet Security Fabric. Driving new business is a key MSSP requirement, and Fortinet’s unique channel enablement strategy creates a symbiotic relationship focused on partner profitability. In addition, the integration of security and networking functions help as customer requirements grow because the integrated capabilities allow MSSPs to offer more value-added services in one device than just about any other manufacturer.
Fortinet delivers a wide array of tightly integrated, fully automated solutions that drives market evolution with security-driven networking. Forming a strategic partnership with Fortinet enables MSSPs to drive new growth with consistent edge-to-edge performance.
For more information on becoming a Managed Security Services partner at Fortinet, click here.
Author Jonathan Nguyen is VP of Field CISO at Fortinet. Read more Fortinet blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of MSSP Alert’s sponsorship program.
