Organizations like to work with MSSPs for co-managed security services for lots of reasons. The trick is to make sure the arrangement works for you as well as it does for your clients.
Of course, co-management brings you added revenue and payback for the security services in which you have invested. For your clients, it enables them to enhance their security by offloading it to experts whose mission in life is to stay up to date on the latest hacks and remedies.
What to Tell Prospective CIOs and CSOs
There are several specific co-management selling propositions for MSSP services. The most important one is that you close their security knowledge gap to reduce risk and make the client’s infrastructure safer than ever.
But there are others, including:
- Shorter time to a solution. Rather than having to hire and train new analysts of their own, prospects can simply work with you. If you have the right SOC platform, you should be able to get a new client up and running within a few days.
- Workload reduction. Co-management helps a company right-size IT workloads for an overworked in-house analyst staff. Maintaining a leaner in-house IT staff also reduces the burden on IT management.
- Reduced turnover. By reducing the workload and enabling the client’s IT staff to focus on areas they know well, you also boost morale for their analysts and IT managers, which minimizes burnout and turnover.
- Retained control. The big objection to partnering with an MSSP is a loss of control, but it’s easy for clients to retain control because they’re the ones making the choice about which functions to outsource.
- 24/7 support. One of the biggest advantages outsourcing security is continuous monitoring and support. IT managers can sleep more peacefully and even go on vacation knowing there’s someone minding the store.
Ensuring Your Own Success
Here are two strategies for ensuring your own quality of service, service agility and overall margins:
- Use the right SOC platform. You won’t be able to service clients properly or maintain high margins if your SOC platform doesn’t give you service flexibility or requires more attention than an Italian sportscar. Make sure your SOC delivers full visibility into the client’s infrastructure, that it’s flexible enough to integrate with the security tools your client wants to keep, and that it’s easy for your team to use. Having built-in multitenancy will also make it easy to on-board new customers. Finally, automation and ease of use are important if you want to maintain a lean team of your own to minimize expenses.
- Maintain client satisfaction. Provide regular reports to the client and give them access to your dashboard so they can see for themselves that you’re on the ball. Make sure you deliver statistics on threats found and stopped – those will impress upper management and help justify your budget.
With these ideas in mind, you’ll ensure a win-win for your clients and your own firm, establishing a long-term relationship that can grow over time. To learn more reach out to Stellar Cyber www.stellarcyber.ai
Guest blog courtesy of Stellar Cyber. Read more Stellar Cyber guest blogs here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of MSSP Alert’s sponsorship program.
