Meeting Midmarket Customers' Evolving Cloud Security Needs

MSPs are increasingly valuable to midmarket customers as they are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Midmarket customers are the sweet spot for partners because of they rely on tech suppliers to solve their IT needs. They don’t have the vast IT departments that large enterprises have to thwart attacks, and fend off criminals and bad actors.

So how do MSPs provide an affordable, all-in-one solution that’s easy to deploy and support? In addition, how do they ensure their solution meets all of midmarket organizations’ needs?

During their MSP Summit session, “Cloud Security Threats and Industry Trends for the Midmarket,” April 11, Tom Turner, Coro‘s senior vice president of alternate channels, and Aaron Geiger, Alberici’s CTO, will address these questions. The MSP Summit is co-located with the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 11-14, in Las Vegas.

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Turner and Geiger provide advice for partners meeting midmarket organizations’ cybersecurity needs.

Channel Futures: Do midmarket businesses have specific needs when it comes to cybersecurity that are different from larger enterprises? If so, what are those?

Coro’s Tom Turner

Tom Turner: In my opinion, they have the same needs as enterprises, and that’s where the problem occurs. Most midmarkets have limited IT staff, which makes it hard for them to focus on cybersecurity. Compare that to an enterprise that will go out and buy best-in-breed in all the areas such as email phishing, cloud apps endpoints and data loss prevention (DLP). That is great for enterprises because they have a large IT staff to manage the four different domains. Most of the products out there were originally designed for enterprise customers. At the current time, the midmarket has been left out for two reasons. They can’t afford to buy the best-in-breed in all the above areas, [and] even if they could afford to buy all of the different products, they don’t have the staff to manage them.

Alberici’s Aaron Geiger

Aaron Geiger: The midmarket has many of the same needs of an enterprise because of our scale and the high degree of attacks we experience. Midmarket companies are more limited in budget and people than large enterprises. So they need solutions that are right-sized for their budget and easily adopted by their smaller teams.

CF: Are midmarket businesses’ cybersecurity needs evolving along with the threat landscape? If so, how?

TT: My company, Coro, is one of those, as our product was created for the midmarket. As far as threats, currently the midmarket is under attack. The reason being most enterprise customers have shored up their cybersecurity so the midmarket are left vulnerable. The attacks change daily. There are about 500 new phishing emails daily so the midmarket needs protection.

AG: Midmarket businesses are highly attacked, and are increasingly needing to comply to stricter cyber requirements from their clients and public entities. Fully managed services that function as a true extension of our teams are becoming the highest-value solutions. As the number of different vectors to protect increases, products that offer greater breadth and/or easily integrate into our security stack are highly desirable.

CF: What should an all-in-one security solution entail?

TT: It should include email phishing, endpoints, DLP and cloud apps along with Wi-Fi protection. The problem today is that most solutions are single-threaded. There are some companies that handle email phishing, but that’s all they do. Same for endpoints, etc.

AG: The all-in-one security market is relatively immature in my experience. In an ideal world, a base all-in-one solution would offer endpoint protection (antivirus/malware/threat protection/monitoring), multifactor authentication/single sign-on (MFA/SSO), email protection, web protection, cloud protection and Wi-Fi protection as a base. Most midsize enterprises have these needs as a base, with solutions beyond these being add-ons based on each individual stack.

CF: What are you hoping attendees learn and can make use of from your session?

TT: I hope they learn what needs to be covered in the middle market and help them understand not to leave any holes open that will make the customer vulnerable. There are products available to help them achieve this at an affordable price.

AG: I am hoping to help share real perspectives on cybersecurity with the audience, as I have been a midmarket CTO for the last 11 years. I’ve seen midmarket solutions evolve quite a bit over those 11 years, and am excited to see what the future holds.