Guest blog courtesy of LimaCharlie.Do you know how the global economy will perform next quarter? If you answered, "Next quarter? I wish I could tell you about next week!" you're not alone. We're living through a period of historic uncertainty right now, and it's not likely to let up soon. MSSPs can still survive and even thrive through all of the chaos. But to do that, they'll need to conserve their resources—and that means saving money whenever possible. LimaCharlie's SecOps Cloud Platform (SCP) gives MSSPs multiple paths to cost savings by delivering core cybersecurity capabilities via a public cloud provider model. Think of it as AWS, but for cybersecurity instead of IT. Multiple, well-integrated capabilities offered as cloud primitives. Everything available API-first, on-demand, and pay-per-use. Here are seven ways MSSPs can use the SCP to save money in uncertain economic times: 1. Cut infrastructure management costs For service providers, there are the direct costs of cybersecurity tools—and then there are the hidden costs of using and managing them. A typical MSSP team relies on dozens of different solutions and switches between multiple contexts and dashboards during a typical workday. Obviously, this isn't great for productivity...or the sanity of team members. The SCP gives teams the ability to integrate and manage any security tool with an API interface from within a single dashboard and using a common, JSON-based data format. Response actions to telemetry data can be defined within the SCP as needed. The SCP's bidirectional capabilities also make it possible to automate response actions across third-party tools and platforms. When a team's tools can be managed in one place, or simply in fewer places than before, the cost savings can be rapid and significant. Those savings can quickly be reallocated in ways that benefit the company and their customers. (For more on how the SCP eases tool management burdens, see: Create Instant, Scalable, and Cost-Effective Value for MSSP Customers) 2. Reduce spending on SIEM tools Teams need to route telemetry data to their SIEM solutions—but far too often, every last bit of telemetry data ends up getting dumped into the SIEM so that nothing is lost, resulting in exorbitant costs. Observability pipeline solutions are one possible answer. However, observability tools carry their own costs and require skilled team members to manage them. Most MSSPs hit a point of diminishing returns with these tools pretty quickly. Because data visibility and control are fundamental needs for modern SecOps, observability is built into the SCP as a basic feature. The SCP offers MSSPs the same core capabilities as leading observability pipeline tools—including the ability to visualize, route, transform, and enrich telemetry data—at no additional cost beyond that of ingestion. Teams can use the SCP as a passthrough, sending only essential telemetry data to their SIEM while routing everything else to a low-cost data lake. This can help teams achieve immediate reductions in their monthly SIEM bill without losing access to telemetry data that they may need in the future. The SCP also includes one year of free storage for all telemetry data brought into the platform, meaning that teams can often meet their basic compliance and retention needs by using the SCP itself as a data lake. 3. Save on labor costs with multi-tenancy and IaC controls The SCP is intended to be an engineering-first platform. Multi-tenancy and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) controls are central design principles, not add-ons or afterthoughts. This offers outsized benefits to service providers, who must protect diverse client environments yet are often forced to work with security tools designed for enterprises with monolithic IT setups. In the SCP, all security configurations are defined by rules stored in YAML files. Organizations are managed as tenants. New tenants can be spun up in minutes or even cloned from existing tenants. This offers MSSPs a way to save time, effort, and money by moving away from security workflows that rely on the manual configuration of point-and-click tools and instead embrace the same efficient, scalable processes used by our colleagues in the world of DevOps. It's even possible to use the SCP's Git Sync extension to store IaC security configuration files in a Git repository, thus enabling true version control for security operations. MSSPs can build workflows and pipelines just as software engineers do: with branching, pull requests, audit trails, and easy roll-out or rollback of changes. 4. Reduce your customer acquisition costs (and say "yes" more often) Multi-tenancy and IaC security configurations also lower the difficulty and cost of onboarding new clients for MSSPs. Because a new client organization can be brought in as a new tenant, and new tenants can be created from pre-defined templates (or by cloning an existing tenant), manual onboarding workflows that used to take hundreds or thousands of clicks can be accomplished far more quickly. In addition, since SCP uses a pay-per-use billing model and offers a marketplace of capabilities, integrations, and add-ons, MSSPs can take on a new client or offer a new service without worrying about whether they'll lose money in the process. MSSPs can use the platform to add a revenue stream around a narrow band of use and say "yes" to a special client request more easily. They can simply find what they need within the SCP, work the cost into their pricing, and bring the new capability online with a click. 5. Stop paying for one-off solutions Many MSSPs find themselves acquiring point solutions that are valuable to their relationship with an individual client but play no additional role in the stack beyond that one customer. The SCP offers 100+ cybersecurity capabilities as native features or as free and/or low-cost integrations. Many of these capabilities are sold by point vendors as their entire offering. Service providers find that they can often use SCP alternatives to replace one-off tool vendors in their stack without sacrificing quality—leading to cost savings and greater control over their toolset. 6. Leverage open-source tools Most security engineers know of a cost-effective open-source tool that they would love to use in their day-to-day operations. However, taking on an open-source solution often carries integration and scalability challenges for service providers. Those challenges are manageable up to a certain point. However, as MSSPs scale their operations, the difficulty of maintaining open-source infrastructure can become a serious drain on the team's time and energy, turning an initial cost savings into an expensive drag on productivity. The SecOps Cloud Platform offers "done-for-you" integrations for numerous open-source security solutions. MSSPs can use the SCP to bring these tools into their stack without the integration headaches, managing and automating these powerful and cost-saving technologies through a single interface in a scalable, efficient manner. (For specific examples, see 5 Open-Source Incident Response Tools for MSSPs) 7. Reduce cash flow bottlenecks Lastly, although more of an accounting consideration than a direct tool cost or operational savings, the SCP helps service providers begin engagements faster and get paid sooner. The SCP's pricing and usage model is based on that of a public cloud provider, in contrast to the vast majority of cybersecurity tool vendors. That can make a huge difference to service providers in terms of taking on new business efficiently and beginning new projects in a timely fashion. Consider, for example, a typical IR engagement. Suppose a team wants to deploy its preferred tool or tools into a new customer's environment. Time is of the essence. But they may have to talk to their vendor's sales representatives, work through contractual paperwork, get technical help deploying said solutions, and so on—all before even beginning the engagement! With the SCP, service providers don't need a vendor's permission to get started. Usage is on-demand. Pricing is transparent. IaC controls and multi-tenancy make deploying to a new environment as simple as spinning up a new tenant (either by cloning an existing one or using a pre-configured DFIR template). Work begins when the team and the client are ready. Learning more The cost savings use cases above are already in play at service providers ranging from bespoke shops to large, established MSSPs and global risk consultancies. To talk to a LimaCharlie engineer about how to save money with the SCP, book a demo.
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