How COVID-19 Is Impacting Our Partners in EMEA

The impact of the pandemic is being felt everywhere, so we thought it’d be a good idea to check in with our 501ers across the pond and beyond to see how COVID-19 is impacting our partners in EMEA. 

MSPs need to be poised and prepared to help their customers weather any disaster. But, this being a rather unique one with so many different factors at play, we wanted to pull in some perspectives from different geographies.

So, we decided to solicit some commentary from a few of our 501er folks in the EMEA region, from the U.K. to South Africa. How are they navigating the pandemic and its fallout on their businesses?

Below are insights from several of our partners in EMEA: Dennis Moore, sales analyst and reporting, Netsurit, Matt Torrens, chief operating officer, Sprout IT, Marco Caselli, brand marketing manager, CYBEROO , Mit Patel, managing director at Netstar, Jessica Symondson, marketing director, Complete I.T. and Des Lekerman, CEO, TiG Data Intelligence. 

What are your top focuses right now?

Sprout IT’s Matt Torrens

Matt Torrens: Our initial focus was to mobilize our clients’ business continuity plans — we had huge successes here, with customers using cloud telephony and our hosted VDI and hybrid cloud solutions.

Now that customers are established in the “new normal” of remote working, it is important to review exactly how they have achieved it. Whilst speed was of the essence in the early days of the lockdown, it is imperative that the security of any remote working is reviewed. This extends to shared home computers, encryption of data in transit and at rest, antivirus, etc. 

But I believe that there should be a particular focus on the human element. When humans are stressed, under pressure and working in unfamiliar circumstances, mistakes are likely to occur. Clearly we all find ourselves in this circumstance and so I would advise the implementation of a truly intelligent security awareness, behavior and culture solution that demonstrably reduces human cyberrisk. 

We have also made our ’Sprout Academy’ product free to all U.K. law firms and barristers’ chambers for six months. Sprout Academy is a training platform which enables you to learn precisely what you need, exactly when you need it. We have very relevant sections on remote working, remote team management, mental health, stress and so on.

CYBEROO’s Marco Caselli

Marco Caselli: Right now our main focus is cybersecurity. At the moment, the only crowded squares are digital ones. In this context, we are witnessing an increasing number of cyberattacks that bring harm to data security and privacy.

We’ve seen many different types of attacks, but they seem to be mainly surrounding phishing and stolen information. 

For companies, the current increased use of remote working implies an acceleration of investments in data protection systems. For basic protection, it is obviously necessary to use antivirus, antispam, web filter, firewall. But, for more sophisticated attacks, it is necessary to have more advanced tools such as XDR and Threat Intelligence. These are tasks that we carry out with our cybersecurity division (CYBEROO s.p.a. branch of Sedoc Digital Group).

We focus on an MDR service, managed detection and response. We manage everything through our SOC 24/7 so that the customer can focus on their business without having to worry about anything else.

Complete I.T.’s Jessica Symondson

Jessica Symondson: For starters, we are ensuring that our clients can work safely, productively and collaboratively from home. We have just launched a new solution called Complete Virtual Workplace that can be set up remotely. This is for SMEs needing to move to the cloud.

We are also doing all we can to make sure that our clients can continue to stay open. That may mean remote technical consultancy, regular virtual review meetings, reducing costs for those that need it, etc.

Finally, we’re ensuring that our teams are working in a safe environment, and that their mental health is forefront. To ensure this, we are in constant contact with all team members and are setting up twice-daily ‘drop ins’. We are also doing weekly webinars and Friday virtual pubs. In addition, we’re putting on weekly virtual yoga classes and sending out…