The Benefits Of Moving To The Cloud

By Lynn Tinney, OPAQ

For MSSPs it’s all about management.

Delivering managed security services poses numerous challenges that span deployment, administration and reporting. In each case, they impact customer response, operational efficiency, margins and ultimately profitability.

Deploying hardware and software at each customer location is time-consuming, error-prone and expensive. Managed security services providers (MSSPs) must incur and recoup significant up-front product and labor costs associated with on-site installs and subsequent adjustments before realizing any profit.

And that is just the beginning. MSSPs must also manage several distributed tools at each customer location to address configuration changes, patching, updates, troubleshooting, etc.

To demonstrate the value of their services, MSSPs must also aggregate data from these multiple products to generate individual customer reports. The time and cost associated with delivering managed security services can reduce margins to razor-thin levels.

A cloud model greatly improves management overhead by:

• Simplifying deployments: Adds, moves and changes.
• Reducing up-front investments and keeping credit lines open.
• Providing a single pane of glass for customer visibility.
• Automating unique customer reporting.

 Let’s consider the major benefits of cloud-delivered security.

Time To Value

The cloud enables providers to deploy security solutions in minutes instead of days or weeks, with the flexibility to scale deployments up or down with tremendous speed. 

Cloud-based Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS) platforms simplify the traditional on-premises approach to providing managed security services. A strong cloud platform incorporates a robust set of capabilities that reduce complexity and cost. In addition, SECaaS platforms require fewer people to operate and require no hardware or software.

Full featured cloud-delivered security platforms provide: next generation firewall; web application firewall; Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) mitigation; and software-defined network segmentation, among other integrated security capabilities. MSSPs can extend their portfolio of services and revenue while reducing operational costs.

Higher Margins

Cloud-based security services can boost MSSP legacy revenue by converting existing low-margin security hardware/software businesses into a Security-as-a-Service business. Eliminating hardware/software products and security management tools allows MSSPs to reduce complexity and cost while improving margins. Also, most SECaaS platforms do not require up-front financing, and there is no need to upgrade or refresh individual products.

Centralized Management, Visibility, And Control

A significant advantage of many SECaaS platforms is their ability to provide a single console for monitoring and managing customer networks. They can deliver in-depth visibility for managing and remediating security threats on individual endpoints regardless of whether they are on-premises, branch, remote, or mobile. 

In addition, this single pane-of-glass approach makes it easy for MSSPs to make policy changes from anywhere at any time while also providing detailed, automated reporting that can be customized for individual customer requirements.

Organizations in virtually every vertical industry are reaping the benefits of digital transformation afforded by moving their IT operations to the cloud. With the advent of purpose-built SECaaS platforms, MSSPs now have the same opportunity to migrate legacy services to higher margin, cloud-delivered services.

All of the above advantages allow MSSPs to service their customers with greater agility and flexibility, which ultimately increases satisfaction and retention.

About The Author

Lynn Tinney is senior vice president of channels for OPAQ, a cloud delivered security platform provider. She has successfully led channel strategy and sales for CA Technologies, Riverbed, and Siemens. Lynn is a board member for the Massachusetts Conference for Women, the largest in the United States.