Why ConnectWise is the top MSP choice for cybersecurity solutions

Posted:

02/19/2024

| By:

Raffael Marty

According to our recent research, The SMB Opportunity for MSPs: 2021-2026, 60% of businesses have experienced a financially damaging cyberattack in the past five years, 52% of small and midsized businesses (SMB) cited cybersecurity as a top tech goal and priority for the next three years, and 25% of business decision-makers cited "offering a comprehensive suite of cybersecurity solutions" as a critical capability for a managed service provider (MSP).

However, while cybersecurity opportunities abound for MSPs to meet the growing need, there's a fair amount of uncertainty and confusion to overcome. Over 40% of SMBs report having difficulty understanding cybersecurity, knowing what solutions to implement, and how. As the stakes increase, the pressure to solve this problem will also rise.

Backing your cybersecurity offering with expert experience, up-to-date knowledge of the latest trends, and a strong, unified platform is essential to give your customers peace of mind. Whether starting from scratch or expanding services to an existing cybersecurity practice, we are here to help you navigate.

ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management solutions are purpose-built to launch quickly and deliver outstanding client cybersecurity outcomes. That's why partnering with ConnectWise makes so much sense when it comes to MSP cybersecurity.

The ROI of ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management

Recently, ConnectWise commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the potential business opportunity and return on investment (ROI) partners may realize by building and scaling a cybersecurity practice with ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management.

According to Forrester, MSPs using ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management saw annual gross profits of $1.9 million while also improving client outcomes with enhanced cybersecurity measures and quicker response times to threats.

By automating and streamlining their operations, MSPs were able to focus on revenue-generating tasks and grow their customer base while saving on 24/7 security operation center (SOC) costs. Additionally, MSPs were able to provide cyber insurance support, help meet other regulatory and compliance needs for their clients, and benefit from the partnership and support offered by ConnectWise.

We understand the cybersecurity challenges MSPs face

Let's take a look at some of the most common cybersecurity challenges MSPs face today:

Threat Landscape

The cybersecurity risks for MSPs and SMBs have never been higher, and there's no sign they are slowing down. Cyberattacks against SMBs are constantly changing and growing in type, frequency, and severity—posing serious threats to daily operations. As connected devices, remote users, cloud-based apps, and alerts expand, it's difficult for MSPs to scale, protect their clients, and grow their business. MSPs and their clients are prime targets for a cyberattack and need to be prepared for the worst. That's where the ConnectWise Cyber Research Unit™ (CRU) comes in.

The CRU team is a group of experienced cyberexperts who specialize in MSP-focused engineering, IT administration, security operations, and incident analysis and response. With their years of practical experience, the CRU team is committed to sharing their knowledge and insights to enhance the industry's overall understanding of today's threat landscape and what it means to MSPs and their clients. They aim to assist defenders in strengthening their defense mechanisms and safeguarding their critical assets.

Tool sprawl

To provide cybersecurity, MSPs often use several tools on disparate platforms. This means you have data logs from multiple sources to analyze and provide the visibility needed to understand security positions. It's critical that you get a single, consolidated view of your security data analysis to manage, scale, and make decisions to help make cybersecurity solutions and management more effective.

It's increasingly clear that antivirus and firewalls are no longer sufficient to protect clients against today's emerging threats, so MSPs have headed down the path of adding additional layers of security, including endpoint detection and response (EDR). While having EDR in place offers more protection than legacy prevention-based tools, relying on it without cybersecurity expertise is risky, especially when threats and alerts and the ability to manage them quickly grow beyond expectations and capabilities.

Alert fatigue

The amount of data and alerts generated from security and threat detection tools can be very overwhelming for an MSP to manage on their own. Automation, advanced correlation and event chaining, and high fidelity, enhanced alerting can become the key to eliminating manual, redundant processes—reducing false positives and investigation times, and discovering hidden or overlooked threats before they escalate into attacks.

Cybersecurity skills gap

It is well known that the demand for cybersecurity experts is through the roof, making it challenging for MSPs to find and retain security experts for their team. Adding to the challenge, cybersecurity is not a narrow topic but a practice that encompasses many different domains. Between network security, application security, systems security, and more, it often becomes difficult for MSPs to recruit, train, and retain a team that can provide effective expertise across these areas.

Communication and monetization

As MSPs look at extending cybersecurity, the first reaction can quickly revolve around the additional commitments and investments in personnel and infrastructure. However, an effective cybersecurity solution represents a high-value service for your clients and a potential new revenue source for your business.

To unlock this opportunity, consider how to communicate the risks, benefits, and outcomes to your clients so they understand the need for these vital services, which you can then monetize. Effective, ongoing conversations and education on risk, vulnerabilities, and cybersecurity can help create successful solutions that improve client security postures and MSP profitability.

For more information about monetization, check out this blog: How to Make Money with Cybersecurity

Sales and marketing support

MSP sales teams could face obstacles at every part of the sales cycle. Due to the complexity of cybersecurity solutions, your sales teams may feel uneasy explaining the value of cybersecurity to potential customers, leading to difficulties initiating and upselling cybersecurity services. Furthermore, MSPs can struggle to keep up with back-end processes once a sale is made. However, you can overcome these challenges with the ConnectWise Partner Program and communities, which offer a range of resources, tools, and peer networking designed to help MSPs improve their sales and marketing strategies.

ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management: The one-stop-shop solution to the biggest MSP cybersecurity challenges

Through our multi-layer strategy and purpose-built, multi-tenant MSP platform, the ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management portfolio proactively identifies, detects, and helps restore organizations to pre-attack conditions. Let's explore why each component is essential to your overall MSP security and how ConnectWise can help.

Cyberthreat detection and response

According to a survey commissioned by Cyber Security Cloud Inc., 94% of respondents whose company experienced a cyberattack said it was preventable. Prevention is the first step to securing your business and your customers, and it means putting the appropriate cybersecurity measures in place to keep the bad guys out.

However, relying on prevention alone isn't enough, and it can't detect or stop all threats. Assume that you are never 100% protected despite putting cybersecurity solutions into place, and you're more likely to be better prepared to mitigate damage when disaster strikes.

ConnectWise SIEM™ offers a powerful alternative to expand your cybersecurity perspective to prevention and detection. It breaks down data silos to centralize and correlate log data from all endpoints, networks, applications, the cloud, and Microsoft 365 environments for improved single-pane visibility. Enhanced alerting helps ensure you'll receive high-fidelity, prioritized alerts to protect your digital landscape.

Risk to resilience

Detection is understanding when someone has defeated the protections you've put in place. It's then essential to find those indicators of compromise (IOCs) that show how someone defeated your protections and could potentially do harm.

Many hackers are skilled at gaining "privileged access" footholds on endpoints to make lateral movements toward client data. EDR tools are the most effective detection defense for this stage in the attack lifecycle, yet data-rich and vulnerable attack targets often lack this technology layer in their environment.

EDR delivers endpoint protection for individual end users and provides elevated expertise and protection in cybersecurity events. ConnectWise MDR™, backed by the CRU and ConnectWise SOC Services™, transforms Bitdefender, Microsoft, and SentinelOne endpoint detection and response services into enterprise-grade, 24/7 managed monitoring, detection, and response solutions that are profitable and easy to sell without the challenges and expense of building and maintaining your own SOC.

Operational collaboration

Once you see the signals and detect a threat, how can you tell what bad actors have done and what they're doing now? This information is critical for understanding how you need to respond to remediate those actions. Your response is not only knowing how to get attackers out but also understanding what they've done so you can repair and revert back to normal operations.

Every second counts in a cyberattack. We have a consistent and continuous focus on communication to prepare our partners in times of cybersecurity incidents. With ConnectWise incident response service, MSPs can gain swift understanding and control of the situation to eradicate threats and prevent costly downtime.

Organizational synergy

A ConnectWise partnership combined with cutting-edge, MSP-specific cybersecurity solutions makes a formidable ally for MSP businesses seeking to enhance their cybersecurity posture. Our full range, flexible portfolio helps you identify and quantify unknown risks and vulnerabilities with risk assessment and dark web monitoring.

When prevention fails, you get complete visibility and multi-source data analytics from the ConnectWise SIEM to detect events and correlate management of an open ecosystem of cybersecurity tools. With over 40 years of demonstrated success, ConnectWise is uniquely positioned to help businesses prioritize and manage their cybersecurity efforts for maximum impact.

Tackle the cybersecurity talent gap with our team of experts

The established cybersecurity business at ConnectWise provides a robust portfolio and includes a team of qualified cybersecurity experts taking care of you every step of the way.

ConnectWise SOC Services

The ConnectWise Security Operations Center (SOC) is staffed by more than 200 engineering and cybersecurity experts with experience and certifications across all areas of the security domain. ConnectWise SOC Services are distributed around the world to create redundancy in case of natural disasters and provide 24/7 active monitoring. These cybersecurity experts complement our partners' teams to ensure they have access to the industry's most talented security professionals.

We've also partnered with Bitdefender, Microsoft, and SentinelOne to offer SOC services on top of their EDR.

Related content: Meet Beth Thompson, Team Lead for the ConnectWise SOC | Blog

"Prior to taking on ConnectWise MDR, we saw a statistic stating that the average response time to a ransomware attack for an MSP was 14 hours. Our average response time to a ransomware attack since we've incorporated ConnectWise is less than 14 minutes. This allows us to show clients real value in the selling and delivery process."
Robert Gelsinger, CEO, Secured Network Services.

What's the difference between SOC and incident response services?

ConnectWise incident response service complements the knowledge and work done by ConnectWise SOC Services when a cybersecurity incident occurs and enables and helps your team with escalated investigations. The ConnectWise incident response service gives you priority access to a group of experts ready to investigate identified devices that have been compromised.

ConnectWise Cyber Research Unit

The ConnectWise Cyber Research Unit (CRU) is a dedicated team of ConnectWise threat hunters that identify new vulnerabilities, research them, and share what they find with everyone in the community. The CRU monitors ransom leak sites and malicious botnets for new threats, uses OSINT resources, and uses data from the ConnectWise SIEM to help create content and complete research.

The CRU publishes regular threat reports, threat feeds, and an annual MSP Threat Report. This data is threat intelligence that the CRU has been collecting and curating for years, and it's used internally at ConnectWise for threat hunting and threat analysis assistance.

Related content: The MSP Threat Briefing Series

ConnectWise Partner Program

The ConnectWise Partner Program™ was created to help MSPs build and grow their businesses by creating go-to-market strategies, providing the tools and resources needed to generate leads, and supporting sales teams through the entire sales cycle. Partners in the program experience a true partnership while working with ConnectWise experts to achieve their most ambitious vision of success. In fact, partners in the program grow four times faster than those not in the program and are 17% more profitable compared to the average TSP.

But don't just take it from us—take it from our partners!

For Massive IT, it was important to work with a solutions provider with deep expertise in cybersecurity solutions. To speed up success, the availability of ready-made marketing materials, campaign resources, and guidance on industry best practices was also paramount.

"We were interested in the ConnectWise Partner Program to help us gain new insights, techniques, marketing collateral, and strategies for marketing and go-to-market frameworks," said Massive IT CEO and founder, Michael Emdy. "We liked the organized and methodical approach to the delivery of training, product knowledge, and marketing resources."

A focus on cybersecurity education

ConnectWise also offers a large focus on certification and education through our resources, including IT Nation Secure^™. This major conference has already trained and certified more than 3,000 MSP resources, our MSP+ Cybersecurity Framework, and ConnectWise Certify^™ education.

IT Nation Secure

IT Nation Secure is the MSP industry's must-attend cybersecurity event, providing you with the latest cybersecurity knowledge and solutions to help you reduce risk, grow your business, streamline cybersecurity service delivery for your clients, and network with peers.

MSP+ Cybersecurity Framework

Our MSP+ Cybersecurity Framework is designed for MSPs and defines what good cybersecurity looks like. This framework is supported by a maturity model focused on guiding MSPs towards cybersecurity success.

ConnectWise Certify cybersecurity education

ConnectWise offers cybersecurity education, information sharing, engagement, and business building that supports MSPs. We're here to improve MSPs' cybersecurity postures for their clients, guide them through the cybersecurity journey toward profitability, and keep them aligned with the MSP+ Cybersecurity Framework.

ConnectWise University

ConnectWise University™ offers templates, tools, and best practices to help you incorporate top cybersecurity methods and management into your practice.

Cybersecurity webinar series

The Cybersecurity webinar series dives into the latest cybersecurity topics and conversations to deepen your expertise and knowledge no matter where you are in your cybersecurity journey.

You'll hear from industry veterans and cybersecurity experts who address cybersecurity concerns that threaten MSPs and SMBs, hacker tactics and techniques, operational best practices, and how to build your offerings to meet the evolving threat landscape.

Here are a few recommendations:

Conclusion

There's no other vendor as well poised to tackle MSP cybersecurity needs as ConnectWise. We understand your cybersecurity challenges, and we're on a never-ending pursuit to offer a comprehensive set of solutions, services, communities, and integrations—along with educational resources and peer interaction—to help you capture the cybersecurity market opportunity.

Whatever your goals and vision of success might be, ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management is your partner on the journey. At ConnectWise, we are committed to delivering on this purpose: We power connections.

We connect you to the largest like-minded community.
We connect you to solutions.
We connect you to the consultation, services, and expertise you require to succeed.