Simplifying Security On-Boarding Key For MSPs To Protect Clients

Customers who need help with security are counting on their managed service providers who in turn need to be able to quickly bring required services to their clients.

That's the word from Ryan Walsh, chief channel officer at cloud distributor Pax8 (pictured left), who used his Monday keynote presentation at the NexGen 2018 Conference and Expo to show how his company's services distribution platform provides an alternative to traditional distribution when it comes to helping MSPs match new services to their clients' requirements.

Walsh, along with Nick Heddy, senior vice president of sales and marketing at the Greenwood Village, Colo.-based vendor, said MSPs' clients are facing a myriad of security threats.

[Related: Pax8 Intros Stax Designer To Help MSPs Quickly On-Board New Customers With Full Services Stacks]

Ryan, for instance, cited the recent incident at Marriott, where attackers breached 327 million records that included guest name, address, phone number, date of birth, email address, passport number, rewards number, reservation data, arrival and departure information, and communication preferences.

All that data can be sold on the dark web to the highest bidders who can use it to create targeted phishing attacks and access a wide range of user accounts, he said.

He also cited reports of new cybersecurity threats aimed specifically at MSPs, which he said is starting to get personal.

"You have to think, what if I got breached, and then my customer got breached," he said. "You would go out of business."

Pax8's answer is its Stax platform which is aimed at making it easy for managed service providers to on-board new business customers or new seats at existing customers via pre-configured bundles of services.

Heddy said Pax8 Stax uses a variety of data feeds to present information to MSPs about what customers have already purchased, how up to date they are, and what they need to be more effective.

Ryan said that, specific to security, Stax can do things like scan the dark web for customer information, see if MSP clients have had security awareness training, improve password management, make sure they are protected against phishing and other threats, and ensure data is backed up properly.

Pax8 is introducing a much easier way for MSPs to bring technology to clients than traditional distributors, said Jacob Tukuru, president of Tukuru Technologies, a New York City-based solution provider and MSP.

"My current distributor has been iterating different versions of itself for three or four years to better serve MSPs, but it still doesn't have a simple platform," Tukuru told CRN. "And billing can be a big issue. If Pax8 does what it says it can do, it could be a major change for us."