Managed service providers are tasked with serving a broad range of markets, from construction to healthcare; accounting to legal; staffing firms to manufacturing; media and advertising to technology. But the day-to-day MSP challenges, even across so many diverse verticals, remain the same. Let’s break it down: modern technology changes fast and keeps gaining momentum, so how do you stay current and relevant? Providing quality goods and services gets complicated and pricey fast; how do you give your customers the value they expect without your own margins taking a hit? As the managed services sector continues to grow, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition?
Let’s switch gears a little and talk about cybersecurity. It’s no surprise that MSPs often think of endpoint protection as a “necessary evil.” MSPs have to supply endpoint cybersecurity services that satisfy their clients’ demands, but most solutions involve time-consuming infection remediation, awful system performance, mountains of malware-related downtime, not to mention the resulting customer frustration.
Staying Relevant and Seizing Opportunity
Because SMBs typically lack the internal resources needed to effectively manage complex systems, cybersecurity is an ideal avenue for putting the managed services model to use. Faced with modern threats and the hassles of traditional endpoint protection products, most users feel overwhelmed by security awareness and management, so offering next-generation protection that’s easy to manage, won’t conflict with other software, and won’t slow users down as it keeps them safe is an excellent way to stay relevant and build customer loyalty.
The High Cost of Living
As you well know, providing services isn’t sustainable if your solutions don’t amplify your profitability. But you can drive down operational costs by selecting an endpoint cybersecurity vendor that uses a cloud-based architecture and requires no infrastructure investment, thereby enabling faster deployment and less intensive management. If the vendor offers highly responsive support, automatic remediation, and low resource usage, you can improve customer satisfaction while reducing time spent repairing systems—without having to skimp on quality.
Looking to the Future
When choosing a cybersecurity partnership, be sure to look for a vendor whose solutions foster predictable, recurring revenue to help quantify future revenue for business decisions, and who provides marketing resources and sales enablement to boost MSP margins. And keep your options open—find a partner who offers flexible billing to lower your overhead and enable easy scalability (and won’t lock you into a contract you’re unhappy with in the long run.) Finally, pick a partner with a strong reputation, so you can leverage their proven protection to increase your customer loyalty and generate more referrals.
Proving the Point
Ultimately, these tips are just hearsay. Until you can properly vet a solution in a real-world environment, it’s hard to determine what will and won’t work for your business. Try to find solutions you can trial easily, and look to industry experts and your peers for their experiences and advice.
Read this case study to find out how SWAT Systems, an MSP managing over 3,300 endpoints, drastically improved their customer satisfaction, reduced time spent remediating infections by 75%, and increased profitability an average of 10-20%—just by switching cybersecurity vendors.
Or, take a free, no-risk, no-conflict 30-day trial of Webroot SecureAnywhere Business Endpoint Protection with the Global Site Manager to see the solution SWAT Systems chose in action.
