Five ways MSPs can deliver the advanced endpoint security their clients require

Monday, 07 February 2022 23:09

Five ways MSPs can deliver the advanced endpoint security their clients require

By Anthony Daniel, regional director – Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands at WatchGuard Technologies

Anthony Daniel, Regional Director – Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Islands, WatchGuard Technologies

GUEST OPINION: Australian managed service providers (MSPs) are constantly on the hunt for new ways to deliver better value to their business clients. Improving the performance of IT infrastructures supports business activity and ensures long-term and mutually beneficial relationships.

Increasingly, MSPs are being asked to assist in strengthening cybersecurity measures. Faced with a rapidly evolving threat landscape and an increasing number of attacks, businesses need to be sure their defences are solid and capable of protecting valuable digital assets.

One particular area of focus is endpoint security. With many staff likely to remain in work-from-home mode for an extended period, ensuring their devices are secure and able to connect to centralised resources is critical.

There are five key ways in which MSPs can assist their clients to achieve effective endpoint security during 2022. They are:

1. Deploy a cloud-based management platform:
For MSPs, the advantages of managing their client’s security through a unified, cloud-based platform extend well beyond operational efficiency. This approach also makes the MSP more efficient and reduces the need to employ additional staff as client numbers grow.

This is especially the case when it comes to endpoint prevention and detection as a cloud platform allows effective visibility and traceability of all threats. In addition, an MSP can manage the entire lifecycle of customer licenses, from trials to renewals, from the same environment.

2. Automate core security capabilities:
The diverse range of security products available on the market often leads to businesses ending up with overlapping functionality. This can result in them having to deal with large volumes of notifications and juggle a variety of different management consoles. This, in turn, can lead to alert fatigue with security teams leaving alerts invalidated or ignoring potentially important events.

A better approach is to use tools that can automate many lower-level and time-consuming tasks. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) algorithms can undertake constant threat monitoring and detection and prioritise alerts. This can free security staff up to focus their time on more value-adding activities and the investigation of what the tools have deemed to be potentially serious threats.

3. Introduce zero-trust and threat-hunting services:
By encouraging clients to adopt a zero-trust strategy, an MSP can significantly increase its ability to prevent unauthorised access to networks, applications, and data. Zero trust involves preventing access by any party unless they can prove their identity and the fact that they have been authorised to have that access.

As well as zero trust, effective endpoint security also requires sophisticated threat hunting capabilities. These tools can analyse any suspicious activity and flag incidents for the security team to investigate. When an MSP includes threat hunting in their security offering, it enables them to sell additional services based on the information gleaned from the management console.

4. Use simplicity to increase efficiency:
MSPs are constantly looking for tools that can make managing the distributed networks of their clients easier. They also want to be able to deliver this management without needing to deploy additional on-premise IT infrastructure.

A better approach is to use hosted or cloud-based tools that remove as much complexity as possible from the client’s infrastructure. As well as improving efficiency, this will help to ensure endpoint security is as robust as possible at all times.

5. Leverage vendor relationships:
An MSP’s selection of appropriate security vendors is also key when it comes to improving endpoint security for clients. MSPs need to find vendors that offer continuous and specialised training as well as robust tools that are constantly being improved.

Chosen vendors should also be able to help the MSP overcome the ongoing shortage of security professionals by offering solutions and services that are tailored to their client’s particular requirements. MSPs need to select vendors that can provide integration, automation, security, power, and simplicity.

Achieving effective endpoint security for clients will remain an ongoing challenge for MSPs for the foreseeable future. However, those that are able to achieve this goal will be well placed to thrive in the months and years ahead.

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