How Can MSPs Develop an Integrated Security and Management Solution? Five Best Practices

Featured article by Dan Maloney, VP of Marketing and Business Development, AccelOps

MSPs have to delicately dance between two key priorities: constantly scanning for the latest technologies to meet their customers’ changing needs and running the numbers to see if they can afford to provide those new technologies to their customers and do it in a reliable manner.

One technology service that MSPs are struggling to figure out is how to add security and systems monitoring to their business portfolios, which is in great demand. Solution providers in general see security, especially cloud security, as a heightened concern for their clients and a potentially smart way for them to increase revenues and better serve their customers.

Now comes the question of what to look for when implementing a multi-tenant environment that monitors and secures network infrastructure across both physical and virtual boundaries? This article presents five best practices for service providers to consider when adding security and monitoring services to their already burgeoning tool kit.

Modern Challenges for MSPs

MSPs can have a tough time making the best decisions on the type of security solutions to offer. They traditionally have strong technical backgrounds but often lack sufficient business resources to sort through all the partnership options and revenue models to make the right choice.

Another factor is that many others are also offering security solutions – both other MSPs and even traditional resellers. Many companies can easily offer security products that are configured as narrow “point solutions” designed to address specific problems such as intrusion detection or perimeter defense. However, these solutions may work for some clients, but there are as many security challenges and network environments as there are solutions.

In order to compete in the marketplace, MSPs are going to have to become more sophisticated. The trend is to provide customers with higher-value solutions that can combine security with IT monitoring as an integrated service, thus addressing a wider variety of problems and the potential for greater business opportunities.

Network Monitoring and Security as a Service: Five Best Practices

For every network under management, there are a host of challenges and headaches, not to mention multiple network environments that must be managed and secured at any given moment. Selecting solutions that work in a myriad of client network landscapes can be a daunting task.

As hardware margins continue to drop and operating expenses continue to escalate, MSPs must answer to SLA parameters while increasing ROI. Consider solutions that will provide you with the ability to meet and exceed SLA expectations while lowering operating expenses and adding value to your business.

For MSPs that intend to offer customers assured compliance and security, here are five key considerations:

1. Support traditional and cloud infrastructure options: Because data doesn’t only reside in an on-premise data center anymore, an integrated monitoring and security platform must support physical and virtual infrastructures, including public, private and hybrid clouds.

2. Implement consolidated solutions: That is, consider solutions that combine security, performance and compliance services. The days of offering stove-piped solutions for individual problems is long gone, primarily due to the reality of how data is created and shared inside an organization for collaborative decision-making. Instead of using different products for security, performance monitoring and compliance, a single platform can lower ROI and is less expensive to purchase and deploy, providing potential savings on scarce IT resources for deployment and support. Additionally, rather than implementing disparate solutions, having all data available in an integrated solution makes it easier and faster to evaluate and identify the root cause of problems.

3. Deliver remote management and support: You will need to be able to identify and fix remote problems easily, regardless of which of the many remote management platforms on the market you are using. More and more organizations—and not just multinational conglomerates—have data centers or major computing hubs in different locations. Also, nearly all organizations are supporting bring-your-own-device policies and other remote computing capabilities, so offering a support agreement that can easily handle problems that crop up in places outside the traditional headquarters facility will be essential. Ideally, the solution should provide the tools to initiate communications with remote users’ systems—particularly mobile devices—without having to open up security firewalls and expose those links to hackers and other potential security breaches.

4. Make sure you can work with all major virtualization hypervisors: The virtual machine (VM) hypervisor market is becoming increasingly fragmented. Microsoft, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat and other major vendors are all making significant inroads into the market leadership position long enjoyed by VMware. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly common for organizations to have two or more different hypervisors running different VM workloads, which means MSPs must find a solution that is hypervisor-agnostic. This will make it easier to support a variety of cloud computing architectures such as public clouds like Amazon Web Services or private clouds built by cloud service providers either on a customer’s site or hosted in the service provider’s data centers.

5. Support and leverage a multi-tenant architecture: MSPs need to be able to amortize the considerable investment they have sunk into their own infrastructures across many clients. A secure, reliable multi-tenant architecture can do that in a way that is seamless to each of your customers. The ability to share compute, storage and networking resources across a broad range of customers—without exposing any customers’ vital data to other tenants—allows MSPs to add significant financial value to their offerings.

Moving Toward More Comprehensive Services

Functions such as security, performance monitoring and compliance are always at or the near top of customers’ requirements. This is prompting MSPs to look for ways to support those requirements in an integrated solution that can be quickly deployed and easily upgraded over time to become a recurring revenue stream for the MSP.

For MSPs looking to provide wider and deeper capabilities for their customers’ increasingly complex IT architecture, an integrated solution has now become a critical requirement. That solution also must be easily adaptable to a wide range of infrastructure designs, supporting physical and virtual environments on-premises, co-located or fully managed on an outsourced basis. A solution that offers a single- pane-of-glass view of customer environments will enable you to deliver services of higher value that produce higher profits.

For a more detailed look at monitoring and security services must-haves, download the complimentary white paper here.

About the author:

Dan Maloney is vice president of marketing and business development for AccelOps, the leader in actionable security intelligence for the modern data center. Maloney has nearly 20 years of experience in the enterprise software arena, serving as general manager and global vice president for eCommerce at SAP. Dan was at SAP for 12 years, where he held a variety of leadership roles, including global vice president of business development, focusing on selecting, structuring and enabling SAP’s partnerships for cloud, mobility and traditional on-premise software.