As businesses increasingly turn to MSPs to manage their cybersecurity strategies, providers need the right tools and expertise to address what is sure to remain one of their clients’ most pressing needs for years to come.
The platform you choose to deliver managed security services can make a huge difference in the success of your service offering. If the platform is too complex, making it hard to manage, or the vendor doesn’t update it often enough to keep up with new threats, it will limit your effectiveness. And if a client suffers an attack, you’ll get the blame because you’ve assumed responsibility for protecting them from cyberthreats.
So deciding on a platform is absolutely critical to building a successful managed security practice. You’ll want anytime/anywhere access to a cloud-based dashboard that lets your respond immediately to a threat, and access to threat intelligence to help keep your processes and procedures up to date.
Here are five critical considerations when choosing a managed security platform:
1. Centralized Management
A central dashboard is an essential component to any cloud-based security platform, especially if the platform integrates easily with other remote management tools to facilitate quick access. Centralized management provides visibility into a client’s complete environment, making it easier to identify and problem areas and take the necessary corrective action.
The dashboard should be simple to use with intuitive commands that let users make updates and set rules with one or two clicks, as opposed to having to wade through various screens to complete a single task.
2. Immediate Response
Access to an online-based security dashboard isn’t simply a nice-to-have at a time when infections can jump country borders in a matter of hours. In many cases, security professionals have minutes – or even seconds – to react when a network is hit by malware. So the ability to log into the dashboard to start remediation cannot be overestimated.
MSPs need security platforms that allow them to quickly identify and isolate malware or suspicious code so they can prevent an infection from spreading. When an attack occurs, every second counts – and how quickly you can respond can make the difference between one computer of the entire network getting infected.
3. Mobile Capabilities
You’d be hard pressed to find a business today that doesn’t rely on mobile devices in some way. If your clients need mobile capabilities, so do you. Your cybersecurity platform, therefore, should have a mobile UI that designed specifically for mobile use, allowing you to perform tasks with ease and speed.
Most vendors have adapted their web-based interfaces to mobile use but they aren’t really optimized for small screens of smartphones and tablets, which makes visibility, navigation and analysis more difficult.
4. Threat Intelligence
The threat landscape evolves constantly as new threats emerge in the wild and old malware variants appear in new guises. Threat intelligence helps security professionals keep up with the changes and update defenses.
Some platforms have built-in threat intelligence collected from various endpoints and other sources that ensure cyber defenses are kept up to date. Providers looking for a comprehensive approach to managed security should choose such a platform.
5. Consistent Enforcement
One of the biggest issues affecting security management traditionally is the inability to consistently run processes and enforce policies, which weakens the overall security posture. A cloud-based cybersecurity platform that gives you visibility into your clients’ complete environments solves this issue.
By centrally managing and updating security rules, you can ensure all policies and procedures are current, which helps keep the environment compliant with company policies as well as security regulations.
A platform that addresses these five considerations puts MSPs on the road to success in delivering managed security services.
Guest blog courtesy of VIPRE Security. Read more VIPRE blogs here.
