Boost MSP Profitability
MSPs don’t need another security tool. They need fewer problems. That was the underlying theme in conversations across this year’s RSA Conference. Service providers are battling alert fatigue and tight staffing. Adding another dashboard often just means adding more work.
Many vendors seem to be getting the message. Instead of piling on more alerts, they are focusing on reducing noise, automating repetitive tasks, and helping MSPs operate more efficiently.
At the end of the day, better security doesn’t mean much if it comes at the expense of margins.
Solutions to Improve Margins and Efficiency
Flare
- What It Does: Flare continuously monitors external threat exposure, including leaked credentials. It also automatically validates and remediates those threats in real time.
John Williamson
- How It Helps MSPs Make or Save Money: It reduces the need for manual triage and investigation. It also speeds response times. This allows MSPs to deliver higher-value services without adding staff.
- What Problem It Solves for MSPs: It cuts down on alert fatigue and eliminates the need for analysts to validate whether a threat is real before taking action.
- What to Know: Flare is expanding its platform with automated remediation capabilities that allow MSPs to detect, validate, and shut down threats in real time.
“When you think about MSSPs or VARs who are selling to their customers, the last thing they want to do is create more noise and load on the SOC analysts and Level 1 or Level 2 security operations. By automating it, [we can determine if it] is a real threat and shut it down. We can do that with precision because we validate it in real time.” — John Williamson, chief revenue officer, Flare
Tenable
- What It Does: Tenable provides exposure management across the full attack surface. This includes IT, cloud, identity, and OT environments with added AI-driven automation.
Greg Goetz
- How It Helps MSPs Make or Save Money: The Tenable platform creates an entry point into cybersecurity services while automating routine tasks. With it, MSPs can generate new recurring revenue without significant upfront investment.
- What Problem It Solves for MSPs: Manual work tied to scanning, reporting, and asset management is a burden for MSPs. Tenable simplifies delivering security services without requiring a full SOC buildout.
- What’s New: Tenable recently introduced Hexable AI. The agentic AI engine automates security workflows and transforms exposure intelligence into coordinated action to reduce cyber risk.
“We have our own off-the-shelf agents that can perform routine tasks, like configuring a scan or tagging assets. That applies to someone like a SOC analyst type, helping them do those daily routine tasks and making them more efficient.” — Greg Goetz, vice president of global strategic partners and MSSPs, Tenable
Abstract Security
- What It Does: Abstract Security filters, deduplicates, and routes security data before it reaches downstream tools. Data volume becomes less cumbersome and efficiency improves.
Mike Anderson
- How It Helps MSPs Make or Save Money: It lowers storage and processing costs tied to telemetry. This improves margins by reducing unnecessary data ingestion.
- What Problem It Solves for MSPs: It cuts down on data overload and noise in security tools, making it easier for analysts to focus on meaningful alerts.
- Why It Stands Out: Abstract Security focuses on reducing costs at the data layer. This addresses one of the fastest-growing and often overlooked expenses in security operations.
“What we’re really trying to do is help customers and partners deal with the explosion of data. There’s just too much of it, and it’s getting expensive to store and process. We’re ensuring that we’re dropping down the ingest of data points that you don’t need. That’s going to reduce that cost of ingest prior to being routed wherever it’s going. Then, once it gets to where it needs to go, it’s already been cleaned up. So you’re not overwhelming your downstream tools or your analysts with unnecessary data.” — Mike Anderson, vice president of partnerships, Abstract Security
ConductorOne
- What It Does: ConductorOne automates identity governance, including access controls, approvals, and compliance reporting.
Barnaby Page
- How It Helps MSPs Make or Save Money: It reduces manual work tied to audits and reporting. This creates opportunities to offer compliance and identity services as billable offerings.
- What Problem It Solves for MSPs: It eliminates time-consuming identity management tasks and reduces the burden of generating compliance reports.
- What’s New: ConductorOne recently introduced AI Access Management. This extends its identity governance platform to secure and manage access to AI tools and agents.
“We’re able to now bring this sort of governance at scale through partners like MSPs or consultants because we’ve reduced the amount of services required. They can still sell the services, but we’re just making it a lot easier so that they don’t have to have a huge team of experts. And they can get the margin on that.” — Barnaby Page, vice president of managed services, ConductorOne
SentinelOne
- What It Does: SentinelOne delivers AI-driven security across endpoints, cloud, and identity, with a focus on autonomous detection and response.
Brian Lanigan
- How It Helps MSPs Make or Save Money: The company enables MSPs to scale security services without significantly increasing staffing. This improves efficiency across multiple customer environments.
- What Problem It Solves for MSPs: It reduces manual investigation and response tasks, helping standardize operations across clients.
- What’s New: SentinelOne is expanding its platform to include capabilities for securing AI environments. This followed a recent acquisition focused on protecting large language model (LLM) usage.
“If you think about where the attack surface is going, you have to leverage AI. Maybe you went from antivirus as an MSP to a legacy endpoint solution. That’s not going to protect your customers’ environments. … There’s a lot of confidential information in those servers that you have to protect. And the hackers who are using AI and these legacy solutions just do not move as fast as you need to do. That’s where we’ve seen the massive opportunity with our MSP partners, really gravitating to our solutions.” — Brian Lanigan, senior vice president, head of global partner ecosystem, SentinelOne
What It Means for MSPs
In speaking with ChannelPro at RSAC, most vendors agreed that adding more tools won’t solve the problem. The focus now is on making existing tools work better for MSPs.
Automation, smarter workflows, and better data handling can reduce the day-to-day burden on already stretched teams. That’s where the real value is. The MSP takeaway: The more work you can eliminate, the more room you have to grow.
More ChannelPro coverage of RSAC 2026
➡️ MSPs Can’t Scale Without AI, Vendors Say at RSAC
Featured image: kaliel — stock.adobe.com
