The job of MSSPs and MSPs over the past five years has changed fundamentally, according to
Chandrodaya Prasad, chief product officer at
SonicWall.
It’s gotten busier for sure, with the volume of alerts and tasks growing. That said, the managed security model itself has evolved far beyond the relatively stable assumption that the perimeter was real, threats were known signatures, and a competent team watching a dashboard could stay ahead of it all.
That model is gone, Prasad told MSSP Alert.
“What replaced it is a profession defined by compounding complexity,” he said. “MSPs are now managing security across physical networks, cloud environments, hybrid infrastructure, remote endpoints, and SaaS applications, often simultaneously, often for dozens of clients at once, and with lean teams. The attack surface did not grow linearly. It fragmented. Every new cloud workload, every remote worker, every third-party integration is a potential entry point that did not exist in a perimeter-only world.”
The economics are also shifting. Clients – particularly SMBs – expect enterprise-grade protection but can’t pay the enterprise-grade prices, he said. MSSPs and MSPs are now caught between the cost of building a capable security practice and the price the market will bear.
“That tension is why solutions without minimums or commitments matter,” Prasad said. “They allow partners to grow a managed security practice incrementally rather than requiring a large upfront bet.”
A Firewall for MSSPs and MSP
That’s a key driver behind
SonicWall’s Gen 8 NSv XS, a subscription-based virtual firewall built for MSPs and MSSPs providing managed security to small and distributed environments, from small offices to distributed branch locations. Introduced this week, the new offering allows security services providers to deliver the capabilities of the vendor’s Gen 8 firewall via virtualized environments and drive recurring revenue.
SonicWall also improved the performance over the NSv XS, including doubling the threat protection, pushing VPN throughput from 500 megabits-per-second in the NSv 10 to 780 mb/s, and expanding the capacity for traffic inspection capability by eight times.
It’s also the first SonicWall virtual firewall to include embedded
cyber warranty coverage via the Cysurance insurance company.
AI 'Has Made Things Harder'
Such upgrades are important, particularly with the rise of AI, which Prasad said: “has made things harder before it has made them easier.” He pointed to SonicWall’s
2026 Cyber Protect Report, which found that high- and medium-severity attacks in 2025 surged 20.8%.
“The key detail in that number is not the frequency, it is the sophistication,” he said. “Attackers are not knocking on more doors; they are picking locks faster, more precisely, and with fewer human operators behind them.”
He added that “AI-orchestrated attacks can probe environments, identify vulnerabilities, and adapt in real time in ways that manual attack chains never could. The platform assumptions built for a world of matchable signatures simply do not hold in this environment.”
Service Providers are Overwhelmed
MSSPs and MSPs aren’t telling that they need better tools, Prasad remarks. What they’re saying is they’re drowning. Even before AI, the alert volume was more than what most providers could handle. Now, there are not only more alerts, but they are smarter, faster, and more difficult to dismiss. IT teams already were stretched thin. Now they’re being told to make better decisions on more signals in less time.
“There is only so much a human team can absorb, Prasad said. “AI is not a nice-to-have in that environment. It is how you close the gap between what is happening on the network and what your people can actually act on.”
The ongoing cloud adoption adds to the difficulty – about 52% of enterprises now run most of their infrastructure in the cloud – with visibility harder for virtualized and cloud workloads. Many security tools were not designed to see into a cloud workload.
Attackers are Targeting SMBs
SMBs are a growing target for threat actors. According to managed IT services provider
Alphacis,
43% of cyberattacks target smaller businesses, due in part to their smaller security budgets and lack of IT security staff. AI has also made it easier for attackers to target multiple SMBs at the same time. In addition, the average cost of a cyberattack to an SMB is $4.9 million, which can run a company out of business.
Smaller firms also can be the path of least resistance into larger supply chains, Prasad said. Many have an IT generalist rather than a CISO or security operations team.
MSSPs are Key to Smaller Businesses
“What they do have is an MSP relationship,” he said. “That MSP is the only realistic path to enterprise-grade security outcomes for a business that cannot staff or budget for them independently. The problem historically has been that the tools available to MSPs for protecting virtualized and cloud environments carried price points and operational complexity designed for enterprise buyers, meaning the economics did not work for SMB-focused partners.”
The structure of the NSv XS addresses this for MSSPs and MSPs. There are no minimums or commitments, and it comes with subscription tiers to match how they price and deliver services, all of which “make it feasible for an MSP to build a managed virtual firewall practice around SMB clients without absorbing risk that makes the business case impossible,” he said.
