MSSP’s: what would SMBs do without you? As someone who spent a significant portion of her career in the services market, I can unequivocally state it’s not for the faint of heart. Regardless the size of the customer, there are several hurdles that must be leapt over to deliver a solid solution.

Why does the MSSP business model work?

It’s not surprising why the managed services security provider business model has taken off since its inception. Especially in a COVID/remote work reality – threats are at an all-time high. I don’t know a single security professional who wouldn’t say that trajectory is only going up too. Especially in a small and medium-sized business, trying to keep up can seem almost impossible. Threats are going up, and the few team members the Lean IT Security team has is getting lured away by big shiny salaries in larger companies. The already overworked become even moreso – it’s an all-too-common story nowadays.

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Then there was hope. Enter MSSPs to the rescue! Taking the day to day management off the lean teams, letting them provide value to their organization in a way they would be too bogged down to do otherwise. Seems like a dream, right? Budgets are low, the market is rough, it’s a no brainer.

What could be helped with the MSSP model?

However, one concern I saw personally several times when talking to customers was that expectations vs. reality for an MSSP were entirely mismanaged. Oftentimes the customer was thinking they were getting a Ferrari for the price of a Ford, and it simply wasn’t true. The difference in terminology between MSSP and full outsource was lost in translation, and you ended up with a bunch of dissatisfied customers and frustrated providers. In some ways, this is still true today.

An MSSP is highly expensive to run. There needs to be lots of flexibility in toolsets and infrastructure, and not to mention the most coveted resource, staff. Being able to cut down these costs and time to remediation is critical to keeping a MSSPs lights on. Alert fatigue isn’t specific to end-customers, it’s a real problem within an MSSP ecosystem as well. This can lead to critical vulnerabilities being missed, which can put your contract at risk.

So what can be done?

XDR to the rescue

MSSPs: you can unlock your bonus level with XDR.

We recently put out a whitepaper on how XDR can help do exactly these two things, among many others. Not sure what type of XDR solution is right for your business? Covers that. Not even fully sure what XDR is? Covers that too. How it can specifically help MSSPs? You know that’s in there. Here’s a little sneak peak of the kind of information you can find in there: Graphical user interface, website Description automatically generated

Download the whitepaper to see how you can level up your MSSP game. We’ll be here to celebrate the W with you.