Cybersecurity is becoming one of the most important growth drivers for managed service providers (MSPs). This is the main insight from a recent study by Lumu. In North America, more than 80% of MSPs cite cybersecurity as a key growth driver for their business. Service providers have a huge opportunity to expand their business and reach new customers by developing cybersecurity products.
This is not surprising as the demand for cybersecurity is in full swing among small businesses and large enterprises. According to Gartner, “By 2025, 60% of organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a key determinant in conducting third-party transactions and business agreements.”
This means that perceptions about security are changing. Responsibilities are becoming powerful business drivers. Of course, cybersecurity continues to evolve at a very fast pace, with threats emerging every day and becoming more and more dangerous. This alone could fuel the perception that COVID-19 is an overwhelming and stressful field, especially since he reshaped the (IT) world.
Cloud adoption and accelerated hybrid work, fraud, phishing messages, and endpoint threats are all concerns for companies that care about their customers. It is also undisputed that cybersecurity is a key component of hybrid work environments. The pandemic has made security teams more aware of digital risks and the importance of strategic defense, security planning, and risk management. Don’t forget the pain of hiring a skilled security specialist and the complexity of many security products.
But MSPs are uniquely positioned to succeed in this reinvention market.
According to the MSP State Report for 2023:
“Cybersecurity is still a huge growth area. Ransomware and phishing/email security services remain top of mind for MSPs, but we also offer reporting, auditing, training, and expanded policy building services for our clients. There are companies that have achieved further growth by doing so.”
This means MSPs have a unique opportunity to build their security brand by better serving their customers’ needs. This could be a key business differentiator over the next decade.
However, simply packaging and reselling security products is not effective. They need to transform themselves into trusted security advisors.
Find out what it takes for service-oriented companies to take full advantage of this major strategic shift.
Building a Competitive Advantage
MSPs are service companies first and foremost, aiming to help their customers with their digital operations. Cybersecurity is an expanding field with many opportunities to create valuable services.
The move to the cloud and digital collaboration workflows has created significant gaps in security coverage across many industries, resulting in inefficient and outdated safeguards.
This also applies to software-driven businesses. The rapid adoption of DevOps practices has created numerous security gray areas that lack monitoring and auditing capabilities.
Not only that, but the last few years have seen a change in the way cybercriminals operate around the world. Cyber threats have focused on enterprise software through so-called supply chain attacks and have been observed to focus attacks on highly leveraged entry points, such as employees with special IT privileges such as developers. I’m here.
But building a competitive advantage means creating value for your customers. In cybersecurity, demonstrating such value can be difficult.
Therefore, it is important for MSPs to better understand and build on the challenges facing security leaders today.
— How can I get full visibility of what is happening in my environment?
— How can potential misconfigurations and vulnerabilities be detected?
— How can you prioritize among a growing list of priorities?
— How can you respond quickly and efficiently to threats within your organization?
— What are the threats unique to my organization?
Then select the appropriate tool set. Tools are not the definitive answer to these questions. These enable service providers to understand their customer’s environment and create a security roadmap for mitigating risk.
When operating at scale, MSPs believe in being able to separate the signal from the noise (not all vulnerabilities are created equal) and leveraging that information to resolve issues quickly and accurately. I have to prove it.
Deploying solutions without operational capability only exacerbates the problem.
Customers expect intelligence and tailor-fit advice, regardless of size or industry.
There is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rethink security as a process, or security as a service.
Now the central issue is: How do you stand out?
Find compromised credentials in front of hackers and add value
Scalability, observability, response automation, and educational value enable service providers to provide the best possible service to their customers. Advancing the cybersecurity space by delivering exceptional value is the way to go.
GitGuardian is a code security platform that specializes in detecting leaked credentials (secrets) in source code. Provides a solution to monitor internal source code repositories natively integrated with GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure Repos.
Hardcoded secrets are a burgeoning problem for nearly every software-driven enterprise. They are copied and shared across environments that you have little or no control over, posing a significant threat to your enterprise. Last year, we found that application security engineers were completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of credentials in their codebases. On average he has 3.4K secrets per engineer.
Building on this auditing capability to provide actionable insights for SOC analysts is immediately valuable to security teams. You can start using the platform for free here.
GitGuardian also provides public oversight capabilities to determine the global boundaries of your company on GitHub. Over 6 million secrets were discovered by our discovery engine in 2021 alone, double the number from the previous year. Many of these credentials are trade secrets that were accidentally released.
This monitoring capability allows you to proactively identify threats and protect your enterprise from compromise.
If you’re ready to embrace the industry’s move towards security-aware advisories, request a free demo and start auditing your customer perimeter on GitHub.
