Security Roundup: MSP Opportunities, Netsurion, Check Point, Dome9

A big topic of conversation at this month’s Channel Partners Evolution was how MSPs can take advantage of the massive cybersecurity opportunity and meet customers’ increasing demand for more advanced protection.

We spoke with Netsurion and SSE Network Services during the conference about the challenges MSPs face as they increase their cybersecurity arsenals.

Guy Cunningham, Netsurion’s vice president of channel sales and alliances, said the sales agent and MSP communities are his company’s target markets from a channel perspective. His company is in the process of combining its two brands: Netsurion’s Secure Connectivity and EventTracker endpoint and network security.

Netsurion’s Guy Cunningham

“One of the things that MSPs are going to find over the next three to five years is that security has to become part of their lifeblood,” he said. “They have to figure out how to incorporate that into their offerings. The second difficulty is that there’s a significant skills shortage, it’s predicted that by 2021 there’s going to be 3 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs, so a small MSP is not going to be able to compete for the talent or be able to afford the talent. So they’re going to have to partner with somebody who’s got the scale to be able to hire those people and retain those people to provide those security skills. So we’ve really positioned ourselves well for that.”

Netsurion can provide managed network, and security incident and event management (SIEM) to an MSP so they don’t have to staff for it, and can focus on managing the customer relationship, Cunningham said.

MSPs have no choice but to move into managed security services, and they’re already losing customers to MSSPs because they’re not meeting their cybersecurity needs. And there’s more pressure to offer advanced security such as threat detection.

“That requires eyeballs on glass and looking at activity, and they just don’t have the time for it in their own individual businesses,” Cunningham said. “Our technology can be installed on all the infrastructure in a customer’s network, so that’s workstations, laptops, servers and firewalls. We’re going to look at all the activity across that. The end user is the biggest weak point, but the target is going to be at the server where the sensitive information is — but they don’t necessarily try to attack the server directly. They’re going to come in through the back door and work laterally across the network until they can find a way to get in. So being able to see north-south, east-west traffic is really important.”

SSE Network Services is a step above a MSP and a step below a MSSP, and relies on its MSSP partnerships, and its tools and techniques to meet customer demand, said Greg Thornton, its vice president of network and security services.

“We don’t have security operations center (SOC), for instance … so we’ve found a very good partner that we’ve gone with that does ours,” he said. “Security is at the very front of our focus in everything we do. We have to keep our networks reliable and safe, and we have to know that …