When prospective clients contact an MSP for the first time, they’re usually looking for help with a problem. Often the problem is that the business has been hacked and doesn’t know how to remediate it.
A savvy MSP will seize that opportunity to solve the immediate issue and try to retain the client long term. An effective way to do that is by discussing with the client the challenges that businesses face to protect themselves against an increasingly dangerous cyber threat landscape.
Demonstrating the ability to mange cybersecurity for businesses is one of the most compelling arguments you can make to win new clients. Businesses need as much help from MSPs in protecting their data as running their environments.
If they’re being honest with themselves, SMB owners and managers recognize they usually don’t have the resources or requisite knowledge to keep the hackers at bay. Transferring cybersecurity duties to an MSP, therefore, gives them their best shot at enjoying the same advanced protection as enterprises.
The Right MSP Cybersecurity Tools
MSPs need the right tools to protect clients against advanced threats, gather intelligence on the latest threats, maintain full visibility around the clock into client environments, and be able to respond to an attack from anytime/anywhere as soon as it is detected.
In a recent VIPRE Security study, 68% of MSPs reported they have the ability to remotely access their security platforms to remediate a cyber attack on a client. That leaves one third of MSPs without this capability. If you’re among them third, you need to rectify that. But if you’re among the 68%, you can make a compelling argument to prospective clients about your ability to respond to attacks.
You can tell them no matter where your staff is, should an attack occur, a technician can log in to the security platform and start taking steps to minimize the impact. That would include isolating the targeted device or system, scanning the network to see if other machines are infected, and initiating the mitigation process.
The ability to respond in seconds to an attack – not minutes or hours – is absolutely critical now that we’ve seen ransomware infections spread across six continents in a matter of hours. This is possible through the use of cloud-based security platforms with remote monitoring. Clients want assurances that MSPs have the technology and expertise to help them avert a disaster.
Making the Case
To persuade clients to handle cybersecurity for them, here are five points MSPs should make:
- Keeping up with the threat landscape is more than most SMB business can handle.
- As an MSP, you get to know the client’s environment intimately, which puts you in a better position than even the client to guard its data.
- Centralized, remote tools allow you to keep an eye on the environment constantly.
- Real-time alerts let you respond to an incident immediately.
- With an MSP in charge, clients needn’t worry about whether their tools and software are kept up to date because that’s part of the MSP’s job.
In making the case to clients to hire an MSP, also remind them that it’s always better to do so before they suffer an attack. While contacting an MSP for remediation after the fact is obviously a good idea, it may be too late to prevent data from being exfiltrated, so damage to the business is inevitable.
Guest blog courtesy of VIPRE Security. Read more VIPRE Security blogs here.
