Fears of a cybersecurity disaster have reached new heights in Australian boardrooms. For those playing catch up after the digital transformation driven by COVID, it can be difficult to feel confident in their existing security stance. Add in skills shortages, and it can feel almost impossible to escape uncertainty.
For managed service providers (MSPs), this all comes together to present an important moment for providing value to businesses through standardised, automated and compliance-focused security processes, using smart automation and monitoring tools to do so.
“With changes to government reporting requirements for those who have been compromised, right now, there is better awareness around security implications,” says Craig Allen, CTO APAC at Kaseya. “Our latest Global MSP Benchmark survey1 shows that 48% of APAC MSP respondents highlighted security as their number one challenge in 2022. People are aware of it and boards are losing sleep over it.”
“But MSPs can turn things around very quickly for a business. They’ve got exposure to a multitude of businesses and verticals, and they can quantify how they can take a business through stages of maturity in a measurable way.”
Compliance through the Essential Eight
Allen feels that Australia’s Essential Eight offers a clear method to quantify what MSPs deliver and how they deliver it and makes an excellent frame of reference for strategic conversations. Its association with the latest regulations for government departments and for government suppliers shows why adherence is now so important, and its maturity model offers a simple way to benchmark a business and show then the best path forward.
“MSPs should review a business and show them for instance, that they’re at level zero or level one, and then deliver a strategy to reach maturity level two, and show them the process to get there and the tools they will use to deliver that,” says Allen.
For many organisations, helping them understand the role of security compliance in the future of their company and the confidence it offers to customers can enhance their understanding of the importance of the Essential Eight.
Compliance is also more than a list of policies and tech solutions. It’s also a communication challenge to ensure staff understand why they can’t run any software or why they must adhere to new security processes. Through the use of tools like the Essential Eight there is a standard underpinning the culture change that is being asked of internal teams.
Saving time and money with automation
From core security to business continuity and disaster recovery, an MSP can deliver on such requirements to meet Essential Eight maturity targets and do it all through a central management platform with minimal manual workload. Compared to the costs in time and budget to achieve such goals through an internal team, an MSP offers an incredibly strong proposition.
“Budget is always a constraint, particularly if you’re trying to find people to do it,” says Allen. The chances of hiring 3, 4 or 5 people quickly to address your security vulnerabilities is low. But an MSP can automate that solution via an RMM tool and then easily manage it through a VSA.”
“We’ve also seen in our recent IT Operations survey2 that 45% of APAC IT respondents are looking to leverage more automation in 2022,” says Allen. “So we know that more automation and simplification through the Kaseya stack is always a benefit to the MSPs we work with.”
Compared to manual efforts, the automated application of a policy-driven deployment of whitelists, security settings, patch maintenance cycles, network and application hardening, and backup processes is something that can be carefully rolled out once and then easily monitored into the future.
“Automation means it is repeatable,” says Allen. “The more you automate, the better your compliance is going to look, the more secure your customers’ environments, and the less manual overhead it brings to the organisation – and the MSP.”
Allen points to Kaseya’s ability to deliver zero touch environment deployment as a further example of the time and cost savings of automation, with the ability to take a new system and have it set up, patched, deployed, and hardened without any engineer involved in preparing a fully compliant device.
Simplified management for better performance
While Kaseya’s solutions can be consumed as independent tools, it has continued to make its VSA a point of deep integration to offer workflow advantages to its customers.
From the simplicity of a unified operating environment and synergised tools and alert processes to the confidence of a single vendor solution with simple reporting outputs for internal and end customer needs. Features like the Automation Exchange offer easy scripts, policies and other resources to MSPs that they can download, test and deploy with minimal manual effort.
Kaseya is conducting a national Connect IT roadshow during November to give MSPs a chance to learn from its leadership on how to grow MSP service offerings. All the details are available at the. Connect IT Local events in Australia and New Zealand
1: Source: 2022 MSP Benchmark Survey Report: MSP Industry Trends
2: Source: 2022 IT Operations Survey Report
