The law of supply and demand exerts profound influence on our daily lives, from determining how much everyday consumers pay for staples like food and fuel, to impacting the costs businesses face when producing goods or services while still pricing them competitively in the marketplace. These latter issues have become particularly urgent for MSPs and VARs struggling to hire cybersecurity talent.
The growing complexity and sophistication of today’s threat landscape is driving enormous demand for IT professionals with experience and expertise in the field of cybersecurity. This increased demand has resulted in a scarcity of available cybersecurity professionals, and a commensurate rise in the compensation those experts command. The effect of this phenomenon on MSPs has been dramatic; according to a recent survey by Kasperky Lab, two out of three MSPs are suffering from a shortage of qualified cybersecurity staff.
As the survey notes, MSPs clearly understand the importance of offering security services to their clients. Among the survey respondents, 77 percent of MSPs with smaller customers (up to 50 end-user workstations) believe that expanding their security portfolio should help them attract new customers. In a similar vein, 78 percent of those MSPs working with larger businesses consider cybersecurity a way of retaining their current business accounts.
In short, MSPs recognize the value of meeting the growing demand for more and better cybersecurity services, but are hampered in their efforts to expand security offerings by the insufficient supply and the elevated hiring costs of cybersecurity professionals who are deemed necessary to deliver those enhanced services.
How Threat Intelligence Eases MSP Workloads
But there is a answer, an alternative way to ramp up the protection and flexibility of your endpoint security services without hiring expensive cybersecurity talent. By deploying solutions that employ threat intelligence, such as the Webroot Threat Intelligence Platform, MSPs can significantly improve the breadth and depth of protection they offer to clients while reducing the time IT staff must spend administering their endpoint security solution.
For example, Webroot SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection delivers a multi-vector advantage over other solutions, covering threats from email, web browsing, file attachments, hyperlinks, display ads, social media apps, and connected devices like USB drives. It also identifies sophisticated, never-before-seen threats that use blended strategies to deliver malicious payloads.
This unique approach to endpoint protection is powered by the Webroot Threat Intelligence Platform, providing global visibility of all attacks underway, leading to enhanced and timely protection for users and their devices through all stages of an attack including delivery, infiltration, and infection.
The Webroot Threat Intelligence Platform encounters tens of millions of instances of malware and potentially unwanted applications and monitors billions of IP addresses and URLs. It analyzes millions of new and updated mobile apps for malicious behavior and studies major malware trends based on data from millions of endpoints. All of this and more continuously enriches the Webroot Threat Intelligence Platform and allows Webroot to accurately and effectively protect organizations from sophisticated attacks.
Webroot's MSP Focus
Using this threat intelligence, Webroot closely monitors the activities of unknown processes until it can definitively categorize file behaviors as good or bad, with a high level of accuracy. If a previously unknown file’s activities are later identified as malicious, Webroot SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection can quickly and easily roll back the changes made by the malicious process.
While the current shortage of qualified and affordable cybersecurity talent is challenging, the good news is that MSPs can still deliver superior protection to their clients. Real-time, contextual, and predictive threat intelligence that spans the spectrum of attack vectors is the critical component in implementing a truly modern and effective security strategy. Simply put, it’s the only way to fight back against today’s cybercriminals and give MSPs like you an edge.
Guest blog courtesy of Webroot. Read more Webroot blogs here.
