The human threat is often the biggest risk to an organization, whether through malicious actions or—more commonly—accidental activities. Since the COVID-19 pandemic increased remote work, accidental end-user security issues have risen, with many organizations lacking the resources to address these off-platform challenges.
Managed service providers (MSPs) can help organizations defend against cybersecurity risks stemming from two main user groups: general workers and IT workers.
The general non-IT worker
Access control list (ACL) controls, along with data leak prevention (DLP), and digital rights management (DRM) services, can provide granular defenses against malicious insider (and outsider) security issues. Such services can control access while also tracking information usage, including the ability to block access and even securely delete information from an employee’s device should they leave the organization.
For accidental ‘bad behavior,’ DLP is also an excellent tool. For example, if you apply DLP controls around emails, when an employee accidentally uses a wrong email address in the ‘To:’ or ‘cc:/bcc:’ fields of an email client, DLP can pick up that information and then it can either block it or inform the sender of a possible issue. Again, granular DRM can make it such that recipients can only carry out specified acts against information that they do have access to – for example, not being allowed to forward it or to cut and paste content.
Both DLP and DRM require a central management system, which plays straight into an MSP’s strengths. Not only is it expensive for an organization to host its own DLP and DRM servers, but they also need to be available 24×7 – a strong MSP play.
The IT worker
This brings us to a common challenge faced by many organizations: ineffective IT workers. Many end-user organizations are lax in their operations, mainly due to a shortage of skilled staff who fully grasp the importance of strict security measures. Data center access may be inadequately monitored, and system administrators often have broad, unrestricted access, working independently with minimal oversight and relying on ad-hoc scripts for routine tasks. In some cases, organizations even allow administrator privileges to be shared, making it difficult to determine who is responsible when something goes wrong.
This can be catastrophic. A poorly written script run with elevated privileges can bring down an application, a whole server, or even a whole platform. If the organization lacks suitable roll-back, business continuity, or disaster recovery plans, it can massively impact their business.
As an MSP, security hygiene is second nature. System administrators track every action they take as tickets and close them once the task is complete. Access control is granted to specific personnel for physical access to hardware. Appropriate software systems should orchestrate any changes to systems, with full pre-checks and rollback capabilities. The lifeblood of an MSP lies in providing high-availability services that quickly address issues and minimize their impact on all customers.
With the right orchestration and systems management software in place, system administrators shouldn’t need to write many scripts themselves. Instead, they should rely on automated systems to monitor and fix issues as they arise.
The importance of adopting new technologies
Another area where MSPs can really help their customers is the speed to embracing and updating technologies. Currently, artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the interest of nearly every organization on the planet, but few have the capabilities to effectively research and implement AI in their own organizations. However, an MSP is more capable at implementing AI technologies across its platform to spread the cost of acquisition, implementation, and maintenance across its customer base. When it comes to protecting customers against human security lapses in their own organization, AI can be a strong card to play. AI can more easily pick up on activities that could point to problems in use and can either initiate remediation actions or alert administrators to the issue.
MSPs should embed AI within its overall platform. This will allow you to build and monetize additional services on top of the AI engine for customers. AI’s use as an underlying improved security service is just a by-product of adopting AI. This by-product could make the difference between gaining new customers, retaining existing ones, or losing them to competitors who have embraced AI.
Robust platform capabilities are worth their weight in gold
As an MSP with such capabilities in place, you may overlook the importance of leveraging your own security capabilities. However, they can be a major selling point to your prospects. Prospects and customers alike may struggle with errors introduced through manual activities. They may see the costs of managing these errors—through software and skilled staff—as beyond their capabilities.
For you, it should be table stakes, preventing user errors is an integral part of the services you provide, already factored into the cost.
Sing it loud and sing it clear: these ‘basic’ MSP platform capabilities are worth their weight in gold. Create additional services, such as DLP, DRM, and AI, to simplify and add value to the processes your customers rely on to run their business. By incorporating these services into your offering, you take a crucial step in minimizing the risk of end-user errors.
Photo: Golden Dayz / Shutterstock
