In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, MSPs face tremendous pressure to grow a cybersecurity practice. They are expected to tightly safeguard their clients’ systems and data — as well as their own — against increasingly sophisticated threats.
That reality is driving MSPs to rapidly evolve their business methodologies and develop more comprehensive cybersecurity practices. Relying on legacy tools and reactive data protection measures is no longer sufficient to secure clients from next-generation cybercriminals.
To truly protect modern infrastructure against these new threats, IT services firms need to embrace more comprehensive solutions and leading-edge strategies. These strategies must address both the technological and human challenges businesses deal with today. That’s not easy.
More Responsibilities, Fewer Resources: The MSP Security Balancing Act
MSP security challenges range from the high cost of acquiring and training team members on these more advanced solutions to implementing new techniques across the organization.
The ongoing skills shortage makes recruiting and retaining cybersecurity professionals an even bigger task. Recent research from ISC2 suggests that the current global workforce trained in these technologies is approximately 5.5 million while demand has hit an astounding 10.2 million — a gap of 4.8 million trained workers.
Meanwhile, MSPs’ responsibilities expand as their clients’ technological and compliance requirements grow. Balancing all those demands, including financial and resource limitations, makes it increasingly more difficult to build more formidable cybersecurity practices.
Act Now: 3 Focus Areas to Maximize Impact with Minimal Investment
To battle these challenges, service providers need a well-designed plan and partnership strategy. This can help IT services firms minimize investment requirements in these areas while strengthening their protection and services capabilities. Let’s take a closer look at three areas MSPs can focus on to make that happen.
1. Reframe Cybersecurity as a People Problem
While technology is, for good reason, the focus of many data protection discussions, the real challenge lies in talent. The industry faces a critical shortage of qualified professionals. Global cybersecurity job vacancies reached 3.5 million in 2023 and over 750,000 in the U.S. alone.
Soon, human error or lack of talent is projected to be responsible for more than half of significant cyber incidents. Many organizations are leveraging skeleton crews to protect their infrastructure, lacking the true expertise needed to maintain and optimize these business-critical ecosystems.
Justin Crotty
This skills gap leads to misconfigured technologies, overlooked business requirements, and ultimately, unforeseen vulnerabilities. MSPs can look at this as a challenge internally, finding and training qualified professionals capable of providing those services. It also can be a major opportunity externally, addressing those shortages for current and prospective clients.
Solving the primary cybersecurity challenge is not merely a matter of accessing the right level of human resources today. It’s about developing a strategic plan for hiring, training, and enabling the next generation of cybersecurity talent.
2. Build Talent and Expertise Through Strategic Partnerships
Addressing the people problem goes beyond just hiring. It demands cultivating and continuously developing a pool of skilled professionals.
Few MSPs have the financial resources, time, and personnel to manage these types of hiring, education, and training programs on their own. Providing a growing stream of new talent with the capabilities and certifications needed to protect themselves and their clients against tomorrow’s cyber threats is a heady job.
Securing those collective IT ecosystems will get exponentially more difficult as cybercriminals expand their use of AI and more advanced technologies in their attacks. So, MSPs will have to invest even more wisely to stay ahead of those rapidly evolving and increasingly more complex threats.
Forging the right partnerships can reduce those burdens. For example, Exclusive Networks is working closely with California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) to address the skills gap and find and nurture the next generation of cybersecurity talent. This “student-force” approach goes beyond traditional internships or mentorships. Select university students have the ability to learn on the job with Exclusive Networks’ team, vendors, or solution provider partners.
From Day 1, these students acquire knowledge and skills through active engagement. Depending on the position, they may even seek accreditations and other critical job prerequisites. This program gives MSPs an easy way to identify future employee prospects and leverage their growing cybersecurity expertise early on.
Managed security services companies can also alleviate the skills gap. Instead of being stuck in a constant cycle of searching for talent, MSPs utilize these organizations to protect their collective data, freeing them to focus on other critical business objectives such as sales and strategic development.
3. Transition from ‘Tired’ to ‘Wired’ Security Approaches
Traditional, reactive data protection models — characterized by incident triage, run books, and status meetings — are giving way to proactive, cloud-first strategies. “Wired” service providers use dynamic, use case-driven approaches that leverage AI, near-time analytics, and cloud solutions like Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and persistent data discovery.
This shift allows MSPs to maximize the value of their technology investments, ensure continuous data awareness, and stay ahead of emerging threats. These proactive environments are typically cloud-hosted and hybrid to support remote workforces and enable rapid responses to incidents.
Proactive providers also embrace convergence, utilizing approaches such as security service edge (SSE) and secure access service edge (SASE). These architectures reduce the attack surface, consolidate legacy technologies, and provide quickly deployable advanced security services. These methods improve risk resiliency and operational productivity. They also simplify management by reducing the need for multiple agents and siloed solutions. MSPs and their clients benefit from consolidating teams and technologies, adopting cloud-native solutions and focusing on holistic data protection strategies.
Overcoming Challenges in a Cloud-native World
As organizations move to virtual applications and infrastructure, MSPs face new challenges:
- Limited visibility into data context and user behavior
- Expanded device footprints
- Evolving threat actors
Security and infrastructure teams must overcome competing priorities and fragmented solutions to deliver resilient, scalable protection.
Advanced technologies increase the complexity of cybersecurity strategies, so MSPs must constantly ensure their clients upgrade their infrastructure to keep pace with future threats. The solution lies in holistic, converged approaches that prioritize data security and enable business operations without compromise.
Secure Today, Scale Tomorrow
MSPs looking to enhance and grow their cybersecurity practices should begin by examining all their managed data. Consider where it resides, how it moves, and how it can be protected.
By reframing cybersecurity as a people problem, building talent through strategic partnerships, and transitioning to proactive, converged security models, they can deliver more robust data protection today while positioning themselves for future success.
Justin Crotty is vice president of services for Exclusive Networks North America, and general manager of Cloudrise.
Featured image: iStock
