The evolving cyberthreat landscape has come into full focus within the past few years, leaving MSPs to prioritize keeping their customers fully protected. For many MSPs, this means maximizing the value from their cybersecurity offering, specifically their remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool.
SmarterMSP sat down with Mark Whiffen, Senior Product Manager at Barracuda MSP, to hear his advice on how MSPs can get the most out of their RMM tool. Mark shares how MSPs should focus on the important role RMM tools play in detecting anomalies, tracking increased endpoints, and remediating and managing customers’ environments remotely. Emphasizing these points will assist MSPs in realizing their full potential through their RMM and help customers gain a better understanding of their MSP’s offering and partnership.
How have recent trends impacted the importance of an RMM?
The sudden change from in-office work to a complete remote workforce has expanded MSPs management exponentially. Not only are MSPs required to support unsecured home networks, but they also must expedite their customers’ digital transformation, from adopting SaaS platforms, to accommodating a BYOD policy, to expanding their web presence with ecommerce capabilities. To top it off, cybercriminals were, and are still, taking advantage of these changes.
In light of these trends, MSPs that I’ve spoken to have struggled with balancing convenience for the end-users while ensuring security for their environments. With the growing trend of supply chain attacks, MSPs must not only protect their customer, but also secure their own environment to prevent attacks from breaching their administrative platforms to gain access to customers’ environments.
MSPs need to take a closer look at how they leverage their service delivery tools, especially the RMM, because it will play an even more important part in the MSP’s arsenal. They then need to look at how to best deliver and monetize those services.
What to look for in an RMM to achieve the most value
To obtain and deliver the most value from their RMM as possible, MSPs should look for an RMM that is among the best in:
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- Continuous monitoring and alerting for any cyberthreats that breach a site or network. Cybersecurity is a process, not a ‘one and done’ thing.
- Enhanced AI and machine learning to protect against even the most sophisticated threats.
- Connecting to any employee/end-user device, wherever it is located, to monitor threats and remediate attacks. MSPs need to worry about securing users, devices, and data.
- Integrating with your RMM vendor’s other cybersecurity offerings, allowing MSPs to visit a ‘one-stop shop’ and only contact one line of support if they ever experience an issue or have a question or request.
- Continuous assessments of the security strength of networks and customer sites that make it easy to identify any vulnerabilities existing within a customer’s security posture and alert them to make the necessary, recommended changes.
- Reporting that highlights any new vulnerabilities that have emerged and the progress the MSP has made in resolving previously identified weak points in the customers’ security posture.
Priorities for securing workforces moving forward
Cyberattacks will continue to increase, both in volume and complexity, so MSPs should invest in RMM and other tools that are easily integrated, streamline these tools where possible, and make sure to include security assessments as part of their offerings. MSPs can offer assistance in defining required cybersecurity policies for individual end-users at their client organizations and move to implement the suitable services needed to meet these policies.
Further, an RMM can go beyond the initial identification of existing gaps and enable MSPs to address them, which by default uncovers sales opportunities. RMM also helps SMBs meet specific compliance requirements for customers in key verticals such as healthcare, financial services, and the public sector.
An RMM should enable clients to operate to the best of their abilities while remaining secure despite the evolving cyberthreat landscape. Cybercriminals (and their attacks) have become so much more sophisticated. Today and moving forward, security requires a multi-layered approach to protecting the user, their devices, company data, and applications, which RMM is well-positioned to do.
To hear more from Mark on maximizing the value from an RMM tool, listen to his recent podcast appearance on XaaS Journal.
Photo: Mr.B-king / Shutterstock
