Faces of the Partner: MSPs that Are Experts in Cybersecurity
MSPs that serve SMBs globally are in the early stages of a huge boom cycle.
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Adam Harling is managing director of Netitude, an MSP based in the United Kingdom.
Channel Futures: How would you describe your company? How does it stand out among the competition?
Adam Harling: Netitude stands out in the market as a fully comprehensive IT partner. Our service ensures perpetual compliance with the U.K. government-backed Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus security standards. We view security as a primary objective, with all clients, without exception, equipped with a full stack security suite, including managed detection and response (MDR) with 24/7 SOC monitoring and response, vulnerability management, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered email filtering with URL inspection, Microsoft 365 backup, DNS filtering, security awareness training and quarterly auditing. This approach enables us to put principles such as a zero trust framework into place. We view cybersecurity is a primary pillar for enabling digital transformation, and it’s what our clients look to us to enable and achieve.
CF: Has cybersecurity been a growing part of your business?
AH: Cybersecurity has been a core element of our business for many years. However, and thankfully, the market and primary decision maker education and awareness has improved. As a result, we see clients move business to us as they require the reassurance that their security position is robust, with all bases covered, enabling them to concentrate on core business and adopting further digital transformation strategies and tools such as business intelligence, automation and AI.
CF: What’s driving your company’s growth in cybersecurity?
AH: Better client awareness, better technologies and successfully educating our client base. Improving our clients’ ability and capability is a core value we live by. This investment pays off with good security aware cultures nurtured and established across our client base. People are always the key component in any business, and anything we can do to grow and enable better technology understanding and ability is 100% inside our remit.
CF: Have the cybersecurity tools/solutions that you rely on shifted in recent years in response to the evolving threat landscape? What are now the most critical cybersecurity tools?
AH: The advent of endpoint detection and response/managed detection and response, and extended detection and response (EDR/MDR/XDR) platforms has enhanced our client’s security position dramatically, and we now insist all clients adopt this technology, among other core security stack components. Security information and event management (SIEM) has also enabled greater visibility, advanced warning and response to security events. We are also seeing great take up in secure access service edge (SASE) platforms as more businesses operate from remote or disparate locations, requiring secure end-to-end communication, traffic filtering, and greater conditional access policy control for the myriad of cloud-hosted services now in use. However, while these technologies are now essential components, the most impactful is still user education, training and awareness.
CF: Who are your clients (by industry/sector/size) and what cybersecurity challenges are they facing? Is it a challenge to stay on top of those?
AH: We typically work with midmarket (100-2,000 headcount) businesses in the U.K. primarily in the manufacturing and construction industries. Manufacturing has been seen as a target due to the high impact supply chain disruption can have, both financially and reputationally. The sector has also historically, in the UK at least, underinvested in cybersecurity, leaving it a somewhat sitting duck. Thankfully, this attitude is slowly changing, and investment is improving dramatically.
Chris Vincent is president of Global Data Systems, an MSP based in Lafayette, Louisiana, with additional offices, and sales and technical personnel, in Baton Rouge and Lockport, Louisiana, and Houston, Texas.
Channel Futures: How would you describe your company? How does it stand out among the competition?
Chris Vincent: People, process and systems allow us to create a consistent customer experience. We figured out early on that just pushing bodies toward the front of the line to field customer issues doesn’t create a positive outcome. We invested and continue to invest heavily into the systems and playbooks that allow for a consistent outcome. We also seek customer feedback to improve our offerings through our CX team.
CF: Has cybersecurity been a growing part of your business?
CV: Everything we deliver or product we develop has an element of security wrapped around it. It’s part of our core offering.
CF: What’s driving your company’s growth in cybersecurity?
CV: The ability to actually deliver it.
CF: Have the cybersecurity tools/solutions that you rely on shifted in recent years in response to the evolving threat landscape? What are now the most critical cybersecurity tools?
CV: The tool sets used are constantly shifting and improving, which is why we don’t do long-term subscriptions and are constantly evaluating the tool set landscape. The platform we developed allows us to plug and unplug a toolset quickly, which allows us to shift in the marketplace if needed.
CF: Who are your clients (by industry/sector/size) and what cybersecurity challenges are they facing? Is it a challenge to stay on top of those?
CV: We play in several different verticals -- utilities, health care, energy and finance are some of the larger ones. We focus on 150 connected workers on up that have a small set of internal IT staf,f and we deliver a hybrid MSP and MSSP offering. They are challenged by end user training, patch management, network vulnerability, etc.
Anne Bisagno is CEO of Xantrion, an MSP based in Oakland, California.
Channel Futures: How would you describe your company? How does it stand out among the competition?
Anne Bisagno: We’re one of the top MSSPs in the United States. We’re different in that we’re SOC 2 certified, we don’t outsource any of our services, we take a holistic approach and provide clients with a complete picture of what’s happening with their network, systems, endpoints and cloud environment. We also provide 24/7 incident response so businesses can address issues before they become big ones.
CF: Has cybersecurity been a growing part of your business?
AB: Our cybersecurity services have been the fastest-growing part of our business for more than five years.
CF: What’s driving your company’s growth in cybersecurity?
AB: A number of factors are driving our growth, including our track record of providing cost-effective cybersecurity programs that work in the face of technology and threats that are evolving at breakneck speed, the IT talent crunch, increasing regulations and economic uncertainty.
CF: Have the cybersecurity tools/solutions that you rely on shifted in recent years in response to the evolving threat landscape? What are now the most critical cybersecurity tools?
AB: Our tools have shifted in recent years in response to the evolving technology and threat landscape. Our approach to managed extended detection and response (MXDR) includes empowering our analysts with two advanced intelligence tools: a SIEM platform and a security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platform. Our SIEM platform collects and stores data on cybersecurity activity from across our clients’ networks. Our SOAR platform combines information from our SIEM with real-time intelligence on cybersecurity threats and incidents happening around the world. The platform uses this data and AI to identify simple threats and apply automated solutions. For more complicated issues, the platform alerts our security team, triggering intervention by human specialists.
CF: Who are your clients (by industry/sector/size) and what cybersecurity challenges are they facing? Is it a challenge to stay on top of those?
AB: Our clients are typically regulated entities (financial services and life science companies) and their critical vendors (professional services firms) with $4 million to $45 million in revenue. We also serve manufacturing companies with $25 million to $100 million in revenue. Our regulated clients and their critical vendors struggle to keep current with evolving regulations. Our manufacturing clients struggle to keep current with the evolving technology and threat landscapes. Since we have a dedicated security and compliance team, we keep current on behalf of our clients in all three areas.
Tim Shoop is CEO of Digital Boardwalk, an MSP based in Pensacola, Florida.
Channel Futures: How would you describe your company? How does it stand out among the competition?
Tim Shoop: We stand out from the competition as we have leveraged expertise and process-development to create a high level of operational maturity. I wish there were a badge that identified MSPs based on operational maturity, because it creates a major difference in the approach and strategy, keeping it consistent among all customers, no matter the scale. We also have a strong focus on Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).
CF: Has cybersecurity been a growing part of your business?
TS: Yes.
CF: What’s driving your company’s growth in cybersecurity?
TS: It isn't an option for our customers. It is bundled into our overall solution/strategy for every single customer. This drives growth in this segment, and gives our customers the proper solution.
CF: Have the cybersecurity tools/solutions that you rely on shifted in recent years in response to the evolving threat landscape? What are now the most critical cybersecurity tools?
TS: Yes. When we began in 2009, the cyber stack was as simple as antivirus (AV), firewall and email filtering. Now we have 13 layers of protection bundles in our stack. Some of those solutions include endpoint threat prevention (ETP), DNS, AV, EDR, phishing simulations, security awareness training, patching, vulnerability assessment, ransomware detection, pen testing and more.
CF: Who are your clients (by industry/sector/size) and what cybersecurity challenges are they facing? Is it a challenge to stay on top of those?
TS: We focus on the SMB space. Our typical new customer acquisition can range from 40 to 500 computers. Around COVID-19, our new customer acquisitions seemed to shift from 10-50 computers into 40-500. We have a strong vertical in legal, health care, and CMMC/manufacuring. It's not a challenge to stay on top of the cybersecurity with each, as our solutions are sold and scale with each customer.
Brent Whitfield is founder of DCG Technical Solutions, an MSP based in Los Angeles, California.
Channel Futures: How would you describe your company? How does it stand out among the competition?
Brent Whitfield: We are $10.5 million in revenue and have 31 employees. We’ve been in business 31 years.
CF: Has cybersecurity been a growing part of your business?
BW: Yes. Besides public cloud (Azure/Microsoft 365), security is the fastest-growing part of our business.
CF: What’s driving your company’s growth in cybersecurity?
BW: We revised our stack three years ago. We have 195 clients and we are moving each one, depending on their regulatory requirements, to EDR, applications filtering, SIEM, dark web monitoring, DNS filtering, mail security, multifactor authentication (MFA), mobile device management and regular security scans. We’ve also added comprehensive Pen testing.
CF: Have the cybersecurity tools/solutions that you rely on shifted in recent years in response to the evolving threat landscape? What are now the most critical cybersecurity tools?
BW: All the tools have changed and we’ve moved from an all-inclusive tools master services agreement with our clients to a separate advance security line item.
CF: Who are your clients (by industry/sector/size) and what cybersecurity challenges are they facing? Is it a challenge to stay on top of those?
BW: We service primarily financial professionals, manufactures. Our clients are usually between 25 and 225 employees. We don't have lawyers or doctors.
Considering most SMBs have few to no IT and security employees on staff, they turn to MSPs to deliver the mission-critical systems they require to compete, said Kaseya's Fred Voccola.
"Private equity, and other professional sources of capital, are moving into the $100 billion-plus market of SMB-facing MSPs, as this market explodes," he said. "With massive recurring revenue streams, growing total addressable market (TAM), and low churn, investment in this sector will soon resemble the move of private equity and other professional investment dollars to SaaS companies in the mid-2000s to today."
Considering most SMBs have few to no IT and security employees on staff, they turn to MSPs to deliver the mission-critical systems they require to compete, said Kaseya's Fred Voccola.
"Private equity, and other professional sources of capital, are moving into the $100 billion-plus market of SMB-facing MSPs, as this market explodes," he said. "With massive recurring revenue streams, growing total addressable market (TAM), and low churn, investment in this sector will soon resemble the move of private equity and other professional investment dollars to SaaS companies in the mid-2000s to today."
With malicious hackers attacking organizations of all sizes, MSPs have to continually beef up their cybersecurity to protect both themselves and their customers.
We recently highlighted the companies that rank as the top experts in cybersecurity on the Channel Futures 2023 MSP 501 list of top MSPs in the world. These 61 MSPs offered clients the right managed security solutions, built their own in-house stacks and SOCs, and showed significant growth, which were among the main criteria needed to make this list.
MSPs that provide IT and security solutions to SMBs globally are in the early stages of a huge boom cycle, said Fred Voccola, Kaseya's CEO. Their SMB customers are increasing their spending and investment in technology at a rate three to four times gross domestic product (GDP) expansion, with little plans of slowing anytime soon.
"This is very similar to what we saw in the enterprise in the mid-'90s through 2010, where enterprise organizations invested hundreds of billions of dollars on technology as they digitally transformed to become tech-first companies," he said. "The same investment cycle has begun to hit the SMB sector, as technology investments represent the best and often only option for SMBs to consider in their journeys."
As part of our series, "Faces of the Partner," we've spoken to the leaders of five MSPs that have distinguished themselves as top experts in cybersecurity. Read more in our slideshow above.
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