How MSSPs Can Drop The Box

MSSPs (Managed Security Service Providers) know all too well the challenges enterprises face when managing their security appliances. After all it’s those challenges that give MSSPs their business. What’s less clear, is how MSSPs can deliver security services and meet those challenges in a way that builds a profitable business. Cloud security service provide an answer.

Organizations are often challenged when managing their on-premises and distributed network security stack. They need to plan for capacity increases at each location, maintain hardware, and patch software. As the business grows and new security requirements emerge, forced upgrades of appliances becomes a way of life.

MSSPs face the same challenges on a grander scale. Simply selling services off of the same security appliances doesn’t solve the issue.

As an MSSP, you’re still faced with the effort and time to onboard new customers. Reducing your costs per site is critical, if you’re going to scale the business. As such, automating as much as possible to eliminate the grunt work of running appliance-based networks is important. Similarly, you need to create the streamlined processes to efficiently manage customer networks. And there still remains the challenge of delivering unique and differentiated security capabilities.

By packaging cloud security services to their customers, MSSPs gain the differentiation and value they seek without the overhead and costs of appliance-based architectures. Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) was recently recognized by Gartner as a high impact emerging technology in infrastructure protection.  With FWaaS, the network security stack is moved to the cloud, eliminating the high-touch headaches triggered by distributed network security appliances. FWaaS scales to meet traffic requirements without time and pain of upgrading individual appliances at each user site.

To determine if FWaaS matches your business and customers, consider nine areas – planning, provisioning and onboarding, policy management, software patches, hardware refresh, capacity constraints, product enhancements, troubleshooting, and end of life.  

With the right FWaaS, you should be able to eliminate mounds of security and networking appliances from your customer’s premises. Gone are the capital costs of security services and significantly reduced are your operational costs. Your cost per site should drop for a fast return on investment (ROI) and you should be able to reach new customers with a FWaaS that’s available everywhere.

To learn more about FWaaS and see how they compare with firewalls or Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances read our insightful MSSP edition eBook, Switching Firewall Vendors? Drop the Box!