Return-to-Office Endpoint Security Opportunities for MSPs
How does an MSP make more money in a post-Covid era? When you’re selling endpoint security software to customers, you often find yourself competing on price, but endpoint security is one of your customer’s biggest concerns and a prime opportunity to compete on value.
Smart MSPs are no longer selling endpoint security software to their customers. Instead, they are purchasing the licenses and using the software to deliver a high-margin endpoint security service.
The Endpoint Emergency
An endpoint is anything that connects to the network. It could be a laptop, a desktop, a server, an internet of things (IoT) device, a thermometer in the fish tank, even your refrigerator or other appliance.
Since they are all the entry points to the network, hackers tend to attack them most. This means your customer needs to protect them as much as possible. Even as you leverage a network access control (NAC) solution to inspect any device attempting to connect, you also need to use identity and access management to authenticate and authorize the user. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is becoming more and more the rule everywhere.
With many employees returning to the office, the big concern will be the endpoint devices they bring with them. In the most serious way, you really don’t know where they’ve been. They may have been disconnected from the network at any time and exposed to viruses, worms, trojans or other types of malware. When they come back into your customer’s office environment and connect to their local area network (LAN), that malware can be instantly transferred in to infect the entire network.
When everyone was first sent home, it was with no preparation. Suddenly, the threat surface of most networks went from the area near their network core in their datacenter to the area near the home of each employee who was connecting to the network. And those employees were using residential internet access, which was nearly impossible to protect. Now, almost a year and a half later, you’ve probably helped your customers resolve many of their security problems, but endpoints are still in motion and are the target of more attacks than any other network segment.
Your Opportunity
Since any security is only as good as its weakest link, your customers need you to provide a comprehensive, multi-layered security plan designed to keep them protected from whatever these endpoint devices have been exposed to. You can interpret “comprehensive and multi-layered” to mean a complete offering of security solutions integrated together, complete with plenty of monitoring and management that bring you monthly recurring revenue.
Endpoint security is just one of your many opportunities to provide managed security solutions and services at every layer of the network.
What We Mean by “Multi-Layered”
To provide a more meaningful and robust understanding of the opportunity created by endpoint security, let’s take a technical approach.
In 1983, the International Standards Organization (ISO) introduced a useful seven-layered model for networked computing called the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. This model is still applicable today.
Moving outward from the user, data is entered into the network through software running on the Application layer. This application is running on a device-based operating system at the Presentation layer, which is signed in through the Session layer. Data is moved from that user to another destination by the Transport layer, which uses the Network layer to connect to that destination. This connects to the actual network via a network interface card at the Data-Link layer, which, finally, connects to the actual cabling and wireless infrastructure at the Physical layer. Click on Page 2 to continue reading…
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