Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is a high-demand service with a vital role in cyber resilience and MSP business plans. Like all things cyber resilience, the provider partner you choose is essential to you and your clients.
Here’s what to look for:
Channel experience and commitment
We talk about this quite a bit here at Resilience Hub. Still, it’s hard to overstate the importance of working with a provider partner with a strong reputation, long experience and proven dedication to the channel. Without all three, you won’t be able to scale your business.
A full-service provider
The cyber resilience approach to security and business continuity takes a layered approach to solving the challenges of today’s complicated threat landscape. You want a provider that delivers the full spectrum of cyber resilience services for three vital reasons:
- First, you want all your clients’ points of vulnerability to communicate with each other and harden defenses in real time. A unified front is one of the few advantages companies can deploy against the decentralized nature of cyberthreats, and it pays off.
- Second, the simplicity of a unified solution is much easier to explain, and sell, to clients overwhelmed by the romp cybercrooks are taking through the business world. The solutions mix may be complex, but the positioning is simple – the right defenses, restoration and continuity resources at the right places, all working in tandem with each other.
- Third, the ability to deal with one provider gives your MSP a single point of truth and responsibility. That means faster response and remediation when needed, and it also makes it much easier to scale your cyber resilience practice.
Word-class threat intelligence
MDR is a collaboration between AI-enhanced threat detection remediation technology and top-tier security professionals. You need both. On the technology part of the equation, that means the stronger the threat intelligence, the better the solution. Don’t settle for anything less than a market-leading solution with global reach. With this kind of provider partner, your clients’ defenses are trained up, patched and hardened in real time against threats emerging from anywhere in the world. A partner with a worldwide reach also means you can work with one partner to – you guessed it – easily scale your operations geographically.
MDR flexibility
Clients are unique, and so are the solutions they need. That applies to entire product suites, which is why single-source providers are your best bet for serving all your different clients. It also goes for MDR itself. The provider you choose should be able to deliver MDR in two flavors—a turnkey version (that completely or very nearly manages responses to detected threats automatically) and a version designed more for integration or customized management.
Also, pulling all of this full circle, having both options in a single provider makes it easier to scale your cyber resilience operations.
See the thread that runs through all these attributes? :) Your provider partner should power your MSP’s growth across markets, segments and evolving business needs.
The bottom line
As a trusted advisor to your clients, you lay your reputation on the line every time they turn to you for help and protection. Choose a provider partner that can fully back those vital relationships and has the experience, depth and reach to help you grow your own business.