In theory, cyber resilience is the ability for your business clients to continue to deliver products, services or other outcomes even when systems are compromised or failing.
In practice, cyber resilience is setting up your clients with a combination of cybersecurity and backup and disaster recovery solutions.
In action, cyber resilience helps managed services providers (MSPs) retain clients and earn lucrative recurring revenue streams. Need proof? Read on for two MSP cyber resilience success stories.
Ransomware Recovery Time Cut By 90 Percent
Nerds On Site is the quintessential MSP success story. Founded in London, Ontario, Canada, in 1995, the company went international by 2001 and today serves more than 100,000 clients on four continents. With a broad and deep base, ransomware isn’t just a headline term for Nerds On Site—it’s a problem they’ve dealt with extensively. At one point, the company was helping clients recover from ransomware catastrophes weekly.
“In my over 20 years in the IT space, I’ve seen hundreds of severe malware infections,” said John Hart, a Nerds On Site cybersecurity consultant. “In terms of ransomware
specifically, I’d see at least one nasty one a week.”
When ransomware first emerged, helping clients recover was a laborious process for Nerds On Site that involved:
- Removing machines from a network
- Wiping and reloading the operating system from an image or bootable flash drive
- Reloading all drivers and software
- Running tools from different security vendors to ensure remaining systems were clean before bringing infrastructure back online
Nerds On Site adopted a centralized security monitoring and response operation centered on cyber resilience layers and principles to address cyberthreats. These include Office 365 backup, server backup, endpoint protection and backup, DNS backup and security awareness training.
The results:
- Seamless remote monitoring and management deployments within 30 minutes
- Up to an 80 percent weekly reduction in serious malware-related tickets
- Five-minute file recovery time
- Approximate 15 hours per week saved in endpoint management
- Single-vendor, simplified management for time savings and simplicity
- For Nerds On Site, a lucrative and recurring revenue stream
Most of the ransomware problem itself has been eliminated, said Hart. “Over 90 percent of the time, Webroot and its multivector protection layers takes care of it for me automatically in the background with no interaction required on the end-user side of things,” he said.
And what about the remaining 10 percent? Those are the clients that must experience a problem before they do something about it. “The remainder are those who held off too long using ‘the other guys’ and didn’t switch over,” said Hart.
Read the complete case study, including how a centralized, single-vendor cyber resilience suite was essential to Nerds On Site’s successful adoption of next-generation security tools.
Office 365 Backup To The Rescue
We spend a lot of time at the cyber resilience hub discussing the importance of delivering a holistic, multilayered approach to cyber resilience. But that doesn’t mean that MSPs can’t benefit from starting with a narrower set of tools to score big successes.
Take Australia’s SIAX Computing Solutions—an IT solutions provider that started in 1985 and has successfully made the leap from the break-fix model to MSP. The company delivers managed security, backup and recovery services via a single-subscription model that includes:
- Business endpoint protection
- Security awareness training
- Backup for Microsoft 365
SIAX offered those first two solutions—endpoint protection and security awareness training—for years. When its provider, Webroot, merged with Carbonite to deliver additional services, SIAX recognized an opportunity to address a problem its customers had been experiencing while moving to cloud solutions—recovering accidentally deleted files.
“Many small businesses don’t really understand the importance of backing up until they suddenly need to recover something, and it isn’t there,” said Milan Maricic, chief
operations officer at SIAX.
SIAX had a solution in place, but recovery was time-consuming, intensive and incomplete. After investigating Carbonite Backup for Microsoft 365, SIAX deployed the solution and experienced immediate success—serving 1,000 seats in the first two months. “It allows us to individualize each of our customers’ requirements around what data needs to be backed up and how often, which is an essential feature for us,” said Maricic.
The results?
- Happy customers. “Talk about competitive advantage,” said Maricic. “[The solution] makes us look really good to our clients!”
- Greater efficiencies
- A solid recurring revenue stream
What about the rest of the cyber resilience layers? Based on the successful addition of this third service, SIAX is exploring DNS protection and endpoint backup and protection.
Read the complete case study detailing SIAX’s experiences.