According to Gartner, the MSSP market grew 8.3% in 2020, reaching $12.7 billion in revenue. That’s great news for our MSSP customers.
Marketing 101 tells us that MSSPs do better at winning customers if they understand specifically what buyers want, and then package their services to meet those needs. But it’s a highly competitive and often confusing market for buyers and providers. Here are some insights that can help MSSPs focus.
Every company is different, but enterprises looking for MSSPs have some common strategies and needs, including:
- Buying security with other services such as network services or consulting
- A strong desire and need to leverage the tools and best practices that the customer has — an open system thinking
- Requiring dedicated management of security technologies because they’re outside the enterprise’s internal expertise or don’t fit with its overall IT plan
- Partnering with the MSSP to either take over SOC functions from an MSSP, or co-manage the security infrastructure with their own eyes on glass
- Lastly, the idea of helping them fight modern attacks, where the attack surface goes beyond point solutions — cloud, endpoint, network, user, application, SaaS — where eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) comes in and thus — Managed XDR-MXDR.
Understanding these needs is table stakes for success, but then MSSPs must present their MXDR services in a way that makes sense for the customer. This isn’t always easy, because there are many types of security providers these days, and that has fragmented the market while blurring the lines between services.
For example, MSSPs may offer threat assessment, monitoring, detection and incident response across the whole infrastructure. However, enterprises may want only one of these services and may not consider MSSPs who offer everything.
In addition, SaaS-driven enterprise buying practices have encouraged IT departments to rely on multiple security providers, so MSSP solutions must be able to integrate with existing security tools like EDRs. Now it's clear, MXDR needs to be based on Open XDR.
Check out Stellar Cyber's Open XDR to learn more https://stellarcyber.ai/service-provider/
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.