Continuum to MSPs: Security + Scale or Specialization = Success

Receiving a pink slip from your clients isn’t fun either, George notes. But that’s exactly what some MSPs are in for now that security is the biggest threat to SMBs and increasingly their greatest priority as well.

“Cybercrime now exceeds every other form of organized crime worldwide,” George says. “Think about that. Money laundering, extortion, gambling, prostitution, the drug trade. The sum of all of those forms of crime is now exceeded by cybercrime.”

That’s not likely to change anytime soon either, George continues. “Unlike any other issue in IT that we’ve ever seen, there isn’t a fix for this, there isn’t a quick patch, and it’s not going away,” he says.

That has businesses investing more heavily in security services, according to Peter Rouse of Rouse Consulting Group Inc., an MSP and Continuum partner in Moline, Ill. “If you’re in the healthcare space, or you’re in financial services, or you’re in some things like that, it’s not if I’m going to do it or not. The examiners come in, the regulations are there,” he says. “You’re either doing it or you’re out of business.”

Companies that know they need security help, moreover, want to get it from the same people handling the rest of their IT needs, George adds. “The small business is not going to go and hire a traditional MSP and separately a managed security service provider,” he contends. “They only will want it from one [provider].”

The impending result, George argues, will be a kind of “digital Darwinism” in which only channel pros equipped to satisfy escalating demand for security services endure.

“MSPs that don’t have that capacity over the next two, three years are going to get fired by their small business customers,” George warns.