What MSPs Need To Know Before Developing An Integrated Security And Management Solution

By Dan Maloney, VP of Marketing and Business Development, AccelOps

As MSPs straddle the twin needs of meeting customers’ ongoing technology needs and doing so in a reliable and cost-effective way, security and systems monitoring are two of the high-demand technologies they are trying to add to their business portfolios. What should you look for when implementing a multitenant environment that monitors and secures network infrastructure across both physical and virtual boundaries? Below are five best practices for service providers to consider.

Confusion And Competition: Where Do You Start?

For managed services providers (MSPs), determining what kinds of security solutions to offer can be confusing. 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.

There is also a lot of competition from other MSPs and resellers. This is forcing MSPs to become more sophisticated. There is a trend in the market 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.

Five “Must-Haves” For MSPs

MSPs must choose solutions that work in many different client network landscapes, but that’s easier said than done. After all, 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.

When all is said and done, though, MSPs need to identify solutions that enable them to answer to SLA parameters while increasing ROI in a market where hardware margins continue to drop and operating expenses continue to escalate. Below are five key considerations for MSPs looking to implement a holistic path to network management, while providing customers with assured compliance and security.

1. Support all infrastructure options. An integrated monitoring and security platform must support physical and virtual infrastructures, including public, private, and hybrid clouds.
2. Deploy consolidated solutions. Look into solutions that link security, performance, and compliance services. 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.
3. Offer remote management and support. You will need the capability to identify and fix problems remotely. More and more organizations of all sizes 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 arise outside the traditional headquarters facility will be essential.
4. Integrate with all major virtualization hypervisors. The virtual machine (VM) hypervisor market is becoming increasingly fragmented. In fact, it’s becoming 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 take advantage of a multi-tenant architecture. MSPs that have invested heavily in their own infrastructures need to be able to amortize that cost across many clients. A secure, reliable multi-tenant architecture can do that seamlessly for 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.

Because security, performance monitoring, and compliance are always at or the near top of customers’ requirements, MSPs are looking 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. This has become a critical requirement for MSPs looking to provide wider and deeper capabilities for their customers’ increasingly complex IT architecture.

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. Offering a single-pane-of-glass view helps customers to more quickly obtain a comprehensive overview of their systems while reducing costs to the MSP.

For a more thorough look at best practices for MSPs developing an integrated security and management solution, download our complete white paper here.

Dan Maloney is vice president of marketing and business development for AccelOps, a provider of 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. Maloney 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-premises software.