3 Reasons MSPs Need Prediction in Their Protection

MSPs offering security services have long aspired to preventative protection. Firewalls, antiviruses, email scanning and others are designed to proactively keep known bad actors out. But in a world where you can’t be sure what real threats looks like, from what direction they’re coming or what they’re after, preventative measures often struggle to stop the next attack, especially when it doesn’t at all resemble the ones that have come before it.

In light of this development to the threat landscape, MSPs must offer cybersecurity that shifts customer mindsets from preventative to predictive defense. Attacks today are a given, so thinking you can prevent all of them is irresponsible. Instead, a mindset focused on identifying attacks as early as possible is more realistic and more reliable.

This isn’t to say all the well-known preventative solutions shouldn’t be in place; it’s more that the methods you use to protect your customers should not assume that they will spot–let alone stop–modern attacks. In addition to preventative protection, MSPs need solutions designed to predict threats in the hours, minutes or seconds before they attempt to hit your client. Prediction isn’t just about “the future.” It’s also about the present. When you scrutinize an email that “looks funny” and delete it without opening it, you’ve predicted that if you open the email, it probably contains malware.

There are three reasons why your security services offerings should include predictive solutions:

1. The threat landscape is constantly changing.

There are hundreds of thousands of new malware variants being released, new operating systems and application vulnerabilities being discovered, and new cybercriminals launching their “businesses” daily. Cybersecurity is moving too quickly and too erratically for any one individual to keep up. Predictive solutions are designed to continually learn using the power of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to morph defenses to match shifting attack patterns.

2. There are telltale signs.

But not ones humans can easily spot or spot in time. At the end of the day, regardless of the attack type, cybercriminals are limited by the operating systems and applications they work within. So, while the bad guys spend their time working to cover their tracks, there are only so many things they can do to, say, infect an endpoint. It’s watching these behaviors–the network traffic generated, processes initiated, file locations used, application functions leveraged–that can easily identify potential threats. Predictive solutions aren’t only looking for known behaviors, but also those that could be considered irregular or suspicious, allowing for more vigilant security.

3. Attacks have gone global.

Threats to your customers are part of a larger effort to