How MSPs Can Benefit from a Unified Security Platform Approach

In today’s evolving threat landscape, it’s becoming more and more clear that a unified security approach is essential to a successful security posture. A unified security approach is a scalable platform that helps partners elevate, modernize and expand their security delivery. For MSPs working to help secure their customers’ organizations, building on a unified security platform versus a portfolio of vendors puts them a step ahead. Let’s look at the reasons 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 look back at recent breaches caused, at least in part, by complex and disconnected security. This year alone, we’ve seen a number of headline-grabbing attacks that exploited outdated systems and credentials to cause significant disruption. In the case of Colonial Pipeline, a compromised password and a legacy VPN opened the door to an attack that crippled oil delivery for a large portion of the United States. Another example is a school district in Florida that suffered a ransomware attack in which the hackers demanded $40 million to return files dating all the way back to 2012. These organizations, like many midmarket organizations, had a stack of security solutions that failed due to security gaps caused by the complexity of their environment. Unifying security defeats complexity by bringing normally disconnected layers of security together to improve efficacy and reduce the attack surface.

While a more connected security posture is the key benefit of a unified security approach, there are some additional metrics MSPs should consider in evaluating 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 switching between different product interfaces to manage security for a single client. Streamlining this process into a single platform or console helps remove extra steps and ultimately increases productivity.

This disconnected nature of management solutions also causes loss of visibility and fragmented oversight, which can lead to limited insights and compromised security efficacy across all environments. Unifying security not only improves visibility and insight, it also enables knowledge sharing across normally disparate security layers to improve security posture, reduce time to detection and remediation, and unlock zero-trust approaches.

Another metric to consider when evaluating the use of a unified platform is profitability. By working with a single vendor, an MSP is often able to save money, thanks to fewer fees and other vendor-specific associated costs, lower resources used on training, and so on. They can then pass these savings on to their customers while still 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 hindered by solutions that don’t scale equally with the business. A single solution that is capable of scaling at any rate with easy to use, out of the box integrations benefits MSPs, as it promotes rather than hinders growth.

Lastly, training on multiple vendors takes time. With multiple vendors, each time a business adds another solution to their portfolio, IT teams have to learn another product, another vendor’s management strategies, qualify for certifications, etc. A single, unified platform lowers the barriers to entry of 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, profitability, scalability and barriers to entry, it’s clear that MSPs, and their customers, benefit greatly from the adoption of a unified security approach rather than disconnected, disparate solutions.

Mark Romano is senior director of Channel and Field Marketing, WatchGuard.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.