Five years ago, the traditional MSP’s answer to security was:
✓ Patching
✓ Firewall
✓ Anti-virus
✓ Backup
Is this enough to protect your customers today? No!
While these services were adequate at the time, threats were not as complex. Threats today are happening more often and are far more sophisticated. Hacks are in the headlines almost every day, and business owners are becoming more and more aware that they could be next.
This presents the opportunity for MSPs to approach under-protected SMBs, with a security focused message. Instead of focusing on technology pain points (e.g. slow response times), it opens new conversations. These MSPs focus on protecting and securing their customers from the sophisticated threats they see in the news.
Now comes the hard part – educating your customers on why the old combo (patching + firewall + backup + anti-virus) is inadequate today, and where your services fit in.
One of the simplest ways is with the Layered Security Approach:
Use this approach to explain to your customers:
- What each layer is
- How an attack can touch each/all the layers
- What you can provide to fill those gaps
As there are a multitude of security vendors in the industry today, it’s hard to filter through the noise and find the right solution for you and your customers. In this blog series, I’ll use my knowledge as Brand Manager across many of our brands, and my previous experience in the industry, to talk through each layer and suggest solutions to fill those gaps.
The first layer is the Internet, also known as the perimeter. This is where threats would fly around in the world wide web as bits and bytes, before trying to enter your Network layer (where the firewall sits).
One of the ways to secure this layer is with Mail Filtering. Endpoint protection and/or user training is not always enough to prevent someone from opening infected emails and attachments. By filtering emails at the gateway before they arrive in someone’s inbox, this can reduce the risk of infections and data breaches. You can quarantine these emails in case they need to be delivered, or blacklist them completely if it’s a consistent threat.
MPmail from Manage Protect is a mail filtering service that check emails for threats and spam, allowing you to quarantine or blacklist them completely. You can setup content and attachment filtering policies for inbound and outbound emails. End users can use a cloud dashboard to release their own blocked messages, and can optionally receive twice daily summaries of blocked messages with a clickable release link on each message. The service is packaged in an easy to deploy, and easy to manage interface that was built for MSPs. They also offer email / phone support, within local business hours.
MPmail also features full email continuity. If there is an email outage, your customers can still continue to communicate through the integrated webmail console. Once the outage is resolved, all sent and received emails will be synced back to the primary system. Finally, MPmail can be white-labelled with your logo, allowing you to reassure your customers that you are protecting them from the unknown threats on the internet. For an additional cost you can also keep an archive of all received and sent messages for up to 30 years. Users can search, read, and re-send messages to themselves.
If a higher-level of security for your Microsoft 365 environments are required, then there’s MPmail Avanan. The award-winning machine-learning algorithm from Avanan provides phishing, Data Loss Prevention and malware protection for Microsoft 365 environments including email, SharePoint and OneDrive. Avanan is the first security vendor to protect Microsoft Teams from threats such as DLP and URL protection.
MPmail Avanan also integrates and protects other cloud solutions such as G Suite, Dropbox, Slack and Citrix ShareFile.
Interested to hear more about MPmail? Want to try it out MPmail Avanan before deploying to your customers? Contact us today for more information or to get set up on an NFR license.
