What are you willing to risk your MSP for? How big does a client have to be for you let them operate without comprehensive data protection? What is your reputation worth? New state regulations, potential federal legislation, and spiking cyber liability premiums are all holding MSPs responsible for protecting clients. With the spotlight squarely on MSPs, and cyberattacks at an all-time high, it's critical to the survival and success of your business that you adopt a security-first approach. Not only will you be providing high value services to clients, but you save money, grow your business, and protect your standing in the channel.
What is a Security-First Approach?
A security-first approach puts data protection at the center of everything you do. Because a business cannot run without access to their data, data protection is security. It's important to adopt this perspective on data protection to emphasize the criticality of backup and disaster recovery (BDR) with clients. In practice, this means you require comprehensive BDR for all of your clients in order to partner with your MSP. You bundle BDR with Microsoft 365 licenses, and provide business continuity for both on-prem and cloud environments.
These hard lines are where a security-first approach can be challenging for some MSPs – it requires you to say 'no' to the wrong clients. Understandably, this can be difficult for MSPs, especially those in early growth stages. However, if a client is willing to forego important layers of security, they are putting your business at risk. As the saying goes, 'it's not if, but when' an attack will occur. And when it does, it's your business that pays the price.
Building a Positive Reputation in the Channel
Louisiana, Texas, New Jersey, and Connecticut have all recently created new, or added to, their breach notification requirements. These laws demand that MSPs report cyber incidents to the state to be displayed for public record on what some are calling a 'public wall of shame.' Previously, the business hacked is the one facing public blame and consequences. Now, it's on the MSP who was supposed to be protecting their client.
Public disclosure of your clients breaches give current and potential clients a new reason not to partner with you. Appearing unable or unwilling to protect your clients threatens your reputation as a solutions provider, a thought-leader in the channel, and when you put those things together – it could be fatal to your business. Losing your competitive edge means less clients, lower margins, and reduced profits. On the flip side, keeping your name off of these lists and preventing data breaches, gives you control over your image in the channel. Rather than having to defend a public breach, you can use a positive track record as a way to attract new business and reinforce your relationship with existing clients.
Getting Coverage with an Affordable Premium
High attack rates coupled with inefficient security is scaring off insurance carriers. Many are unwilling to provide vital cyber liability insurance to MSPs, and those that do, have increased coverage requirements and premiums. Insurance applications that used to be a page long are now security risk assessments 20 pages thick. In order to gain coverage today, carriers asses your administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. They want to know the vendors you use, who you rely on for MFA, advanced firewall, antivirus, and backup and disaster recovery.
A security-first approach allows MSPs to not only gain coverage, but at an affordable rate. When a carrier sees that you take security as seriously as they do, their risk goes down and so does your premium. Coverage is especially important for MSPs because of targeted attacks on your aggregate data, so putting security first is essential to protecting clients.
How Are You Prioritizing Security?
Many MSPs 'strongly encourage' BDR, but if you're allowing the option for clients to opt-out, you're allowing data loss to occur. You're putting both your MSP and your client's business in jeopardy. And you'll be the one held responsible by not just the client, but potentially by the state, by regulatory agencies, and by your insurance carrier.
Axcient provides comprehensive BDR exclusively for the channel. x360Recover Direct-to-Cloud meets multiple business use cases with one solution – endpoint backup, no-appliance BDR, turn-key BDR, and public or private cloud backup. Cost-sensitive clients can use the same product for simple file-level backups, as clients willing to pay for a turn-key BDR appliance for local and cloud business continuity. We provide our partners with simple pricing, tried and true sales campaigns, marketing support, and high value solutions to make a security-first approach easy. Start Your Free 14-Day Axcient Trial to see security-first BDR solutions in action!
Guest blog courtesy of Axcient. Read more guest blogs from Axcient here.
