A unified security approach is a scalable platform that helps partners elevate, modernize, and extend their security offering.
In today’s ever-changing threat landscape, it’s becoming increasingly clear that a unified security approach is critical to a successful security posture. A unified security approach is a scalable platform that helps partners elevate, modernize, and extend their security offering. For MSPs striving to secure their customers’ organizations, relying on a unified security platform rather than a portfolio of vendors gives them an edge. Let’s explore why this approach makes sense for MSPs, and what key metrics make investing in a USP a win-win for MSPs and their customers.
As for Why a unified approach makes sense, we can simply revisit recent flaws caused, at least in part, by complex and disconnected security. This year alone, we’ve seen a number of high-profile attacks that leverage outdated systems and credentials to cause significant disruption. In the case of Colonial Pipeline, a compromised password and an old VPN opened the door to an attack that crippled oil delivery for much of the United States. Another example is a school district in Florida that suffered a ransomware attack in which hackers demanded $40 million to return files dating back to 2012. These organizations, like many midsize organizations, had a stack security solutions that failed due to security issues. shortcomings caused by the complexity of their environment. Security unification tackles complexity by bringing together normally disconnected layers of security to improve efficiency and reduce the attack surface.
While a more connected security posture is the primary benefit of a unified security approach, there are additional metrics MSPs should consider to gauge the overall value of a unified security approach. For example, according to a recent Pulse survey, 95% of MSPs believe their team loses productivity and efficiency by switching between product interfaces to manage security for a single customer. Streamlining this process into a single platform or console eliminates additional steps and ultimately increases productivity.
This disconnected nature of management solutions also leads to loss of visibility and fragmented monitoring, which can lead to limited information and compromise security effectiveness in any environment. Security unification not only improves visibility and understanding, but also enables knowledge sharing across normally disparate security layers to improve security posture, reduce detection and remediation time, and unlock trusted approaches zero.
Another metric to consider when evaluating the use of a unified platform is cost effectiveness. By working with a single vendor, an MSP is often able to save money, through reduced vendor-specific fees and other associated costs, reduced resources used for training, and more. They can then pass those savings on to their customers while maintaining healthy margins.
Scalability is another important factor. With disparate solutions, MSPs often have to force their security technology to fit their business model. Their ability to scale effectively is hampered by solutions that don’t scale equally with the business. A single solution that can scale at any time with easy-to-use, out-of-the-box integrations benefits MSPs by enabling rather than hindering growth.
Finally, training on multiple vendors takes time. With multiple vendors, each time a company adds another solution to its portfolio, IT teams must learn another product, another vendor’s management strategies, qualify for certifications, and more. A single, unified platform reduces barriers to adopting new solutions as they can often simply be added on, without additional training or resources.
There are many metrics MSPs should consider when evaluating the benefits of a unified security platform. Looking at factors such as productivity, visibility, cost effectiveness, scalability, and barriers to entry, it’s clear that MSPs and their customers benefit greatly from adopting a unified security approach rather than of disparate and disconnected solutions.
Mark Romano is Senior Director of Channel and Field Marketing, WatchGuard.
This guest blog is part of a sponsorship by Channel Futures.
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