Shane Grennan, Channel Director Middle East, Fortinet, explains how remote working presents an opportunity for Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs).
As businesses have transitioned to a new normal, the cultural impact of widespread remote work seems to be gaining momentum for the foreseeable future. Companies have expanded their remote work policies. For MSSPs, this presents an opportunity to support their customers’ remote work initiatives while ensuring that they have programmes in place that allow for on-going Business Continuity.
As more customers adopt longer term remote work policies, MSSPs are in a prime position to enable secure transitions to full-time telework environments. MSSPs should focus on providing customers with services that secure hosted applications and work from home users. During these times of uncertainty, MSSPs can also offer insights to help customers scale their remote workforce without compromising security. This can be achieved by expanding their current SD-WAN, SD-Branch and public cloud service offerings.
Over the past few months, customers have had to modify their networks and cut costs to ensure Business Continuity. With the groundwork now laid, customers must take additional steps to convert their makeshift solutions into reliable and secure business-ready strategies.
There are three ways MSSPs can leverage security solutions to help their customers address key challenges with remote work:
To account for new working conditions, many customers accelerated their transition to the cloud without adequate planning. This resulted in organisations connecting to cloud environments without proper visibility, access control or data protocols in place. Another area of concern is how customers transferred their workloads to the cloud. Many relied on the ‘lift and shift’ approach, which can result in long-term security and compliance issues. By offering their expertise in this area, MSSPs can help customers avoid potential vulnerabilities within cloud migrations.
When implementing cloud solutions, customers must be able to protect against the risks associated with application and infrastructure configuration and the use of APIs. The problem is that many organisations do not have access to the talent or resources needed to identify or address vulnerabilities in their cloud systems. To address this challenge, MSSPs can offer cloud security assessments as a service. By using assessments to evaluate data security, threat detection and compliance processes, MSSPs can provide customers with visibility into the strength of their cloud security programmes.
With SD-WAN, customers can enable integrated operations that bolster security and performance across multiple remote locations. When working from home, customers are likely to rely on branch networks that may have not been secured to company standards. MSSPs can take advantage of this opportunity by leveraging SD-WAN, combined with Fortinet switches and APs to enable security functionality within existing branch Edge hardware. This will enhance work from home and branch security while also presenting customer executives with opportunities to lower costs.
SD-WAN and cloud connectivity solutions provide partners and MSSPs with a great opportunity to assist their customers looking to establish, maintain or extend their remote workforce. With Fortinet, partners have access to the resources they need to establish integrated cloud and SD-WAN operations across their customers’ distributed networks.