10 Ways to Keep Customers Safe with Threat Protection by Year's End
Cybersecurity vendors share more advice for MSSPs and other channel partners.
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Jon Peppler, vice president of worldwide channels for Bitglass (Bitglass approaches threat prevention from the perspective of secure access service edge. The company uses policy-driven remediation to prevent data leakage or the entrance of malware):
“First, channel partners need to understand where the customer is with respect to their digital transformation journey, and where they want to go with respect to leveraging cloud apps, BYOD, and accessing apps and data via the internet. Once they understand this, they are in a much better position to assess the gap between what they have and what they need to get there, and prioritize which threats are the greatest for that customer.”
David Nuti, head of channel and alliances for North America at Open Systems (Open Systems offers managed detection and response as well as SASE. Thus, its threat protection resides on endpoints, alongside remote users and sites, and on clouds and cloud applications):
“Channel partners should work with solution providers that are willing to execute a sell-with model and do the heavy lifting in early client conversations. This benefits all involved. Also, channel partners new to threat protection should spend time researching the cybersecurity industry, getting to know the basic language of threat protection and understanding what’s driving the latest trends. A strong supplier relationship will help them have insightful conversations and build a more strategic relationship with their customers.”
Kurt Mueffelmann, global chief operating officer and U.S. president at Nucleus Cyber (this vendor focuses on insider threats by evaluating data and user attributes to authorize access to content and what users can do with it):
“MSPs, VARs and integrators must familiarize themselves with modern technologies that are designed to fight modern threats instead of continuing to rely on traditional DLP and security solutions that weren’t designed to address today’s threat vectors, especially when it comes to insider threats.”
Tina Gravel, senior vice president of channels and alliances for Appgate (the vendor treats threat protection from the premise that everyone and everything on the network poses a threat and cannot be trusted until it has been verified):
“Clearly the effects of the pandemic will continue to be felt for the rest of 2021 and that will have an obvious impact on the channel’s ability to sell cybersecurity services in general, and threat protection solutions specifically. My advice to channel partners, however, remains the same as it did even before the pandemic changed our world: Always start with the goal of listening to your customers so you can best help them identify their cybersecurity gaps and then educate them as to why and how a zero-trust approach can help them meet both their immediate and future needs.”
Marcus Conroy, vice president of sales VMRay (VMRay provides automated malware analysis and detection platforms to protect applications and data):
“Those channel partners who can serve as an objective and educated resource to their customers will be best positioned for long-term success. Many channel partners do themselves and their customers a disservice by trying to be all things to all customers. Know where your strengths lie and focus on making them world-class before expanding into new domains.”
Bill Dantz, director of channels at Clumio (Clumio offers data protection for public and private clouds, and SaaS):
“Data protection has always been an afterthought. The value-added partner should be approaching their prospects with a complete solution which includes data protection along with re-platforming, re-coding, application modernization and so forth.”
Faraz Siraj, vice president of channel sales at Code42 (Code42 addresses insider risks and threats from a positive-intent perspective):
“Education and implementation are both key to the channel helping customers improve their threat protection. For insider risk management specifically, MSPs, VARs and other channel partners should serve as a trusted adviser. It comes down to educating customers on how employee monitoring has evolved over time and how modern technologies are no longer intrusive or disruptive to employees, and instead can fit seamlessly into the security stack while allowing collaborative work to happen freely. While many realize there’s a severe problem at hand, without proper guidance they’ll never know there are better, more innovative ways to protect their data.”
Jabari Norton, vice president of worldwide partners at alliances at Sumo Logic (the vendor views threat protection through a security information and event management lens; it focuses on early detection and response, and user training for spotting phishing attempts and social engineering):
“Providers can best approach and address threat protection for clients by embracing SaaS or cloud platforms that provide fast time to value and provide capabilities for both cloud and on-premises in the same platform.
“For example, while traditional SIEM solutions have been integral for MSP and MSSP portfolios, many of them are now migrating to SaaS-based SIEM solutions to make it more flexible for both pure cloud or hybrid environments. Through this change, users are granted specific controls for security compliance and alert correlation for threat protection.”
Jim Lippie, CEO of SaaS Alerts (SaaS Alerts’ platform monitors SaaS applications and alerts MSPs to unusual user behavior on Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox and more):
“Leverage a comprehensive approach that addresses every potential threat vector.”
Corey Munson, vice president of sales and marketing for PC Matic (PC Matic delivers threat protection through zero-trust endpoint security):
“Help customers take a realistic view of where they fall on the cyber risk landscape, and develop a multilayered and holistic cybersecurity plan accordingly. MSPs, VARs, integrators and other channel partners must have their own houses in order and more closely vet their vendors.”
Corey Munson, vice president of sales and marketing for PC Matic (PC Matic delivers threat protection through zero-trust endpoint security):
“Help customers take a realistic view of where they fall on the cyber risk landscape, and develop a multilayered and holistic cybersecurity plan accordingly. MSPs, VARs, integrators and other channel partners must have their own houses in order and more closely vet their vendors.”
Think of cyber threat protection as an ever-evolving organism. As the digital environment expands and adapts, so too do the hackers seeking to exploit their prey. At no time has that become more obvious than since early 2020, amid the rise of COVID-19. That’s when managed security service providers started understanding that the preventive (and, often, reactive) tactics they employed no longer fully sufficed — at least not on their own.
The pandemic changed everything. Remote work, complete with bring-your-own-device and reliance on cloud applications, became the new normal. The floodgates opened for cyberattacks. It became even harder to keep customers safe. As one source told Channel Futures, “When networks change, especially during an emergency, the potential attack surface becomes much more extensive. That weakens threat protection and creates new security gaps.”
Now, into the second quarter of 2021, remote work shows little sign of letting up. In fact, many organizations expect to keep the model to some degree even after the novel coronavirus subsides. That prospect is like dangling candy in front of a bunch of kids. Bad actors, including nation-states, want the intellectual property and customer data that are spread more widely across organizations, and stored in unsecured or easily accessed platforms. To get their hands on those lucrative digital assets, bad actors have even begun collaborating and using artificial intelligence to penetrate cybersecurity defenses. Those efforts have made their mark. According to some reports, cyberattacks in 2020 increased as much as 600%. With remote work continuing, likely on a permanent basis, those numbers only look to rise.
“Every year, the bar gets higher for threat protection service providers and their customers,” another source told Channel Futures.
The potential consequences have gotten more intense, too.
“A cyber incident is no longer just a technology issue; it’s become a board-level issue due to the broad financial and operational ramifications that can be caused by a major breach or ransomware attack,” says another source.
MSSPs often serve as an organization’s primary defender. Thus, threat protection ought to be top of mind for every security-centric channel partner wanting to keep customers safe. Channel Futures has been exploring the issue of threat protection in a series. In the first three installments, we explored the following areas:
In this installment, we ask another big question: How can MSSPs, VARs, integrators and other channel partners best approach threat protection on their customers’ behalf this year?
Click through the slideshow above for answers from 10 industry vendor experts.
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