Running a profitable MSP is challenging in a changing digital ecosystem. It’s especially difficult when you want to expand your portfolio, such as by establishing yourself as an authority on vulnerability management.

People know security is important, but they want proof. With threats emerging with every scan, achieving 100% of remediation is a pipe dream. While offering vulnerability management would certainly expand your customer base, it’s a tough sell.

Difficult, but not impossible, as this article will explain. If you want to sell your services, you’ll need to present your value proposition in real terms. There’s a huge opportunity for growth if you can introduce an effective, high-value vulnerability management offering as a managed service. Here are our tips on how to do it.  

The Fundamentals of Vulnerability Management

Overseeing vulnerability management programs can be difficult. You only have so many people, and the hackers you’re facing seem to have infinite time. According to Forbes, in 2021, a staggering 37% of all organizations suffered ransomware attacks, incurring an average recovery cost of $1.85 million.

At the same time, there was broad consensus that businesses seemed largely unprepared to deal with these issues. Shockingly, over 40% of small businesses had no form of cybersecurity plan in place, and 85% of MSPs said ransomware was among the biggest threats their small business clients faced.

A good risk management plan can save your clients millions. IT infrastructure, and by extension, network security, is becoming more complex every day. Businesses are increasingly adopting distributed and cloud technologies. With breaches becoming more common, you’re likely to receive more requests for preventive measures. You better be ready to meet the demand. 

1. Build the right vulnerability management team

Having skilled and trained people on board is vital. Your people need to be able to shift gears, adapt to new issues and recognise threats that others might overlook. They also need to evolve along with threat landscapes. This means you’ll need to allocate time and resources to training and business development if you want to stay ahead. Asking your team to upskill on their own time won’t be enough.

Your management practices should also promote continuity. With skills shortages and high turnover in the cybersecurity industry, consider establishing training programs that make it easier to onboard replacements when team members leave.

This should go a long way toward making your day-to-day work as simple as possible. Also, think about how you can automate day-to-day administrative tasks. This will not only improve employee job satisfaction, but it will also free up your time to provide the security expertise your customers value.

2. Automate prioritization

A critical part of effective vulnerability management is threat detection and prioritization. By focusing on the most critical issues and the issues that pose the greatest threats, you will make it easier to provide realistic capabilities for your client’s work.

To properly prioritize which threats should be addressed first, a good vulnerability assessment framework is essential. However, manual triage is time-consuming and prone to human error. Research from RankedRight revealed that manual triage costs around £48,000 (or US$$ 63,474) per team on average annually. Meanwhile, it slows down incident response times. Even if you’re a master at project management, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to handle everything manually.

Automating threat detection and prioritization is the smarter alternative. All you need to do is define the rules and let the system figure out which threats meet your criteria. This frees up time and freedom to strengthen other aspects of your operation: focusing on incident response, managing training, and promoting customer transparency to differentiate your business.  

3. Invest in superior systems

Having the right toolkit at your disposal allows you to provide solutions when the time comes. Make sure you have an accurate and thorough vulnerability scanning system in place, or use one your client has in place, and then add the tools and software that will allow you to act on the scanned data as quickly and effectively as possible.

A tool like Lansweeper can’t replace your vulnerability scanner, but it can provide valuable insights into your technology estate regarding risks, potential vulnerabilities, and EOL and EOS information. Plus, Lansweeper’s best-in-class asset discovery provides unmatched depth of detail, so you always have up-to-date asset data at your fingertips.

What will set you apart from other managed service providers? Differentiating yourself is crucial to attracting customers. What makes your services worth it compared to others? Automation that allows you to prioritize and triage vulnerabilities faster frees up your time and resources, which you’ll need to translate into customer value. 

Provide better risk assessment with Lansweeper

Lansweeper helps you stay alert to any potential weaknesses in your customer's network so you can improve your security controls, identify vulnerabilities, and take action before they become a problem.

Lansweeper’s unparalleled asset discovery provides complete visibility into any IT estate. By running IT asset data against known vulnerabilities in the NIST database, it can provide a list of vulnerabilities that specifically threaten that IT environment.

Risk insights in Lansweeper not only show all vulnerabilities that are threatening the network, but also show the CVSS score, more details about threats, and the assets at risk with their complete asset data. This information is indispensable for accelerating threat detection, incident response, and patch management.

Asset discovery should be a baseline for all security policies, frameworks, and best practices. You can’t protect what you don’t know you have. Lansweeper provides a complete view of your IT environment with unparalleled detail and out-of-the-box reporting, so you’re always ready for your next security audit or certification.

Content originally posted at: Lansweeper Blog

We are Software.com.br, the Official Lansweeper Representative in Brazil and also a reference in technology solutions for the corporate world in Latin America. Count on our consultants specialized in Software Licensing, Cybersecurity, DevOps, Infrastructure and Data Analytics.

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