Security
and technical teams will need to be sufficiently trained to talk to customers about the subject, and about each of the solutions you offer, with confidence. If you need to employ one or more cybersecurity specialists,
that’s not going to be cheap – and both technicians and good cybersecurity salespeople are in demand, so hanging onto them might not be easy. If you do lose them, you’ll need to recruit a replacement or train someone else up quickly. You’ll need to think ahead and have some kind of development and training programme in place for cybersecurity staff. As well as incurring a financial cost, specialist cybersecurity training will take up staff time and due to the ever-changing nature of the subject, employees will need to go on refresher courses every few months. As well as being well-paid, you also need cybersecurity
specialists to be amongst the most trustworthy of your employees. Tey will be responsible for making sure your customers know how to make use of security solutions and stay protected. If or when they leave the business, they will take insider knowledge and information with them. You’ll need rock-solid contracts of employment that stipulate a duty of confidentiality on current and former employees. You will also need documentation and processes in place to ensure that, when there is a change of personnel, anyone coming into a cybersecurity role can find their way around quickly. You may also need to have a way of reassigning identities and access rights and updating passwords.
Taking responsibility Te third area of concern for resellers providing cybersecurity is that it’s always going to involve a degree of risk. Yes, it is a big opportunity, and yes, it’s become virtually unacceptable not to offer some kind of protection to customers. But if you do sell solutions that are meant to safeguard customers from ransomware, identity theſt, data loss, and all the business disruption and frustration that are caused by cyberattacks, you will, to a greater or lesser extent, be held accountable by them should they suffer any kind of breach or infiltration. For this reason, SMB resellers will oſten only supply
cybersecurity products on the basis that while they can certainly recommend solutions as providing good protection for a specific point in the customer’s whole security posture, they can’t be responsible if those solutions or services ultimately prove to be not effective enough. Having to take this position might seem necessary for the reseller that does not have any cybersecurity expertise, but it is by no means ideal for either party. While there has always got to be some limitation of liability, small business customers really want the reseller to express total confidence in the cybersecurity solutions they offer.
Underlying risk When customers and resellers start discussing risks and responsibility, it oſten exposes the need to have good and well- maintained security policies that will ensure that staff know how to use security products properly and don’t accidentally leave back doors open. Tis is another area in which the reseller may feel obliged to offer a service. If you do, you’ll either need to offer the coaching yourself, which means having someone on the team with
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sufficient knowledge and confidence to support customers in the writing of their security policies and training their employees, or calling in a third party. Tere is another underlying risk here as well – that if you don’t
offer these solutions and services, someone else will, and that this will gradually undermine your position as the customer’s trusted advisor on IT. Tis is a concern that has oſten spurred resellers into investing and entering new areas of the market, and having a real imperative to get a new part of the business up and running is no bad thing. But for all the reasons outlined above, with cybersecurity it is a little bit different. It takes significant and continued commitment and investment to become truly adept in this area.
The best way forward We believe that the best way forward for many SMB resellers is to offer security as a managed service and to work with a trusted third-party provider or ‘master MSP’. This allows the partner to provide cybersecurity without having to make any up-front investment, and without having to train or recruit specialist staff. It also means that you can meet customer needs and grow your business without taking any risk. Even better, we take the responsibility for security away from you, and as we are already a trusted supplier partner, there is no danger of your business relationships being undermined and taking customers away. We have recently launched our managed services proposition
in the UK and can already offer Endpoint Security, Remote Monitoring and Management, Managed Backup, and Managed Cloud-to-Cloud Backup services, ready for partners to resell. With these core services you can address customer needs immediately, without any formal training or commitment. We provide all the documentation, service descriptions, and contracts, and our team will be happy to help answer any questions you or your customers might have. This should be reassuring because, while providing
cybersecurity services can be daunting, building up a managed services business is not easy either. We have been successfully offering managed services to partners in Germany for many years and have built up a significant operation, providing consultancy, onboarding, support, and constant monitoring of end-user customer sites on behalf of our partners. It’s proven, efficient, cost-effective and, perhaps most importantly of all, profitable for the partner. For all these reasons, we believe that the way forward with
cybersecurity for many SMB resellers is to offer managed services from a trusted third-party provider. This takes away the need to invest in developing and managing vendor partnerships and specialist staff, unburdens you from the responsibility of providing crucial security solutions, and removes any risk that your relationships with customers will be destabilised – we will stay in the background while you will always be the trusted face of the service. Offering managed services from a third-party provider or master
MSP allows resellers to build a recurring services business while offering more value and getting even closer to their customers. To us, it’s an approach that simply makes sense for everyone.
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