For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), proactive and intelligent protection for their data is paramount.
They’ll look to their Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to consider the best options available for their budget.
As an MSP, having the right tools that are capable of backing up your client’s Microsoft 365 cloud data, while suggesting a better security posture will help you deliver value and piece of mind.
SkyKick hosted a webinar to showcase the new developments for two of their core products: Cloud Backup and Security Manager — And to take the reaction from a partner panel of three MSPs from the EMEA region.
The Vision of Intelligent Customer Protection
Before going into demonstrations of some of the new features, Harpreet Duggal, Head of Product & Partner Marketing for SkyKick, explained the vision behind some of the changes.
He explained that SkyKick’s mission has always been “to help our partners be more successful in the Cloud”.
By understanding the challenges partners face everyday, they have developed software and automation to address those challenges.
- Ten years ago, migrations to Microsoft365 were a challenge for MSPs
- Five years ago, it was data protection and backup
- Two years ago, it was helpdesk automation
Today, MSPs are concerned with building a more security-focused offering. To move away from reactive tickets to proactive planning.
Enabling MSPs to fulfil their promise as trusted advisors to their customers.
Ensuring the Security Readiness of Your MSP
Harpreet proposed for proactive security, it comes down to the 3 ‘S’s:
- See It: Easily discover problems and opportunities
- Solve It: Efficiency deliver consistent solutions
- Share It: Engage, retain and grow customers on security
According to Harpreet, the answer lies in a combination of continually strengthening security while also having a safe fallback option. With automation a key-feature of intelligent protection.
Intelligent Protection – Cloud Backup Demo
Varshaa Pallaath gave us an demonstration of the new features in the Cloud Backup product.
The first thing to note was an enhancement to the user interface. The dashboard has a few new tabs to explore.
Smart Insights Dashboard
SmartInsights is a feature that allows you to show individual customers their data growth as well as their data protection trends.
Varshaa demonstrated three of the chart widgets, and what they tell us:
- Snapshot Summary – shows you all the new data picked up in SkyKick Cloud Backup (6 Snapshots are taken per day)
- Total Data Under Protection – a visual chart of the amount of M365 data you’re currently protecting for your client
- Data Protection Status – compares the protected and unprotected mailboxes the client has, showing where improvements can be made
The information in these three widgets allows an MSP to have a conversation with their client about increasing security, demonstrating their value as a trusted technology partner. If there is a growing upward trend in data, but there’s a gap in the protection status, then informing them of the risks and providing solutions will better protect them in the long run.
These charts are a simple way to show a client what is going on with their data security; showing what’s covered and what’s not. Furthermore, for the MSP, they can easily see where the gaps are and close them.
User and Groups Tab
The focus of protection has moved away from what’s being protected to who’s being protected.
You can click on individual users to see what services are being protected, and further drill down into what’s inside each service to perform a restore on a folder level.
Groups management is another new feature that allows you to take advantage of groups set up in Azure Active Directory. It makes onboarding and offboarding at scale much easier allowing you to turn a group of users off and on. You can also do a group restore to restore the data across all the users in a group.
Other Features
Also included in the updates are now more granular restoration options. And alerts have been significantly reduced to prevent alert fatigue.
Intelligent Protection – Security Manager
Mark Deakin gave us a demonstration of some of the new features in the Security Manager portal.
Mark described security manager as a great tool for assessing the security posture of your customers.
Analyse
This tab shows information across your whole customer base, or can be filtered to a specific customer.
- Secure Score – gives you an overall picture of where you are with your customers
- Average Secure Score Over Time – provides a direction of travel of progress, as well as highlighting any sharp pitfalls that need to be addressed
- Recommended Actions by Point – remedial actions you can take to improve the secure score
- Secure Scores in the Top and Bottom 10% – Your top performers and those that need the most improvement
Solutions Pane
The lightbulb icon on the dashboard pulls up a number of solutions that you can do to improve the secure score. These come in the form of Commands, Collections and Workflows that all provide contextual information on what needs to be changed.
The solutions pane is contextual to each other tab on the dashboard too. So, for example the Alerts and Risky Users tab shows specific solutions relevant to that tab.
Security Review Tab
Sometimes engaging the customer about improving their secure score can be difficult without having the facts that demonstrate the value of what you’re doing in front of you.
The security review tab shows them their current score and where it puts them on the scale, and their secure score over time, which shows them the progress made so far. The resolve alerts and time to resolution also demonstrate your value in how quickly you’ve resolved any issues in 90 days, for example.
Next Steps are suggested courses of action where you possibly need to engage with your customer as part of their technical business review, where you might discuss turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Security Radar
Security Radar contains a number of reports, but Mark highlighted two of his favourites:
- Get the Microsoft 365 Security Report – gives a detailed report on what needs to addressed to give your customers a better secure score
- Assigned Licenses Report – shows the licenses that are bought and assigned, but also any disabled services that might be better turned on
Partner Panel Discussion
To finish off the session, Rowan Ridley chaired a panel of MSP partners from a broad cross-section of the EMEA community to get their reaction to the intelligent protection updates.
For brevity, I’ve paraphrased some of the questions asked.
Panel speakers:
- Jeremy Hemus, GCC
- Jurian Rietvelt, Hands on ICT
- Kalle Walleij, PCNET Norden AB
Q. How do you think you’ll use what you’ve seen today to better engage your customers?
Jeremy: As MSPs, one of the things we want to do is to set ourselves apart from the competition. The automation will make our responses much quicker and easier to locate the problem.
Jurian: Also, it’s not just what we can do in the back end, it’s what we can demonstrate to the customer. Showing them exactly what we have done and where we’ve added value.
Jeremy: Agreed. After the initial honeymoon-period where the customer sees the positive changes you’re making. The support tickets stop coming in, and so this is a great way to demonstrate that you’re pre-empting the problems.
Q. Thinking in terms of how we demonstrate value in different countries, what do your customers look to you for in a quality service?
Jurian: I think it’s universal that customers want trust from their IT providers. They put their faith in you to manage their IT and solve any problems. Keeping things running smoothly. However when it comes to security it’s a constantly moving target, so demonstrating a strong baseline and updating the service regularly is the best we can do for our customers.
Kalle: Keeping the customer informed of what you do is important too.
Q. As Microsoft has increased the security side of their products in the last 12 months, do you still look to other third-party security providers or are you using more of the security features within their products?
Jurian: We use Microsoft Azure as a baseline, but we use third party software to test it, SkyKick for backup and security, as well as another tool for end-user Phishing training.
Jeremy: Certainly, we use Microsoft as the baseline. But there are other things you can bolt-on for added peace-of-mind security, like end-user training. In the UK we use Cyber Essentials as a framework, and that is a big help when deciding what type of services we need to offer to keep our customers safe and secure.
Kalle: Security training is going to be the next big thing for MSPs to offer as a service.
To see the full panel discussion, as well as the demos, you can find the webinar catchup on demand here.
Conclusion
This webinar was highly insightful in demonstrating the value of SkyKick’s updated features to MSPs.
Intelligent protection, supported by automation that helps MSPs to fill the gaps in data security, will give their client’s peace-of-mind if we can engage in conversations about improvements, such as turning on multi-factor authentication.
The reports are both an important strategic asset for MSPs, and a tool for educating SMBs in how to be more secure in the Microsoft Cloud.
Are you a Microsoft 365 MSP? Will these new features help you to deliver a secure service without needing a separate stand-alone security product on top?
Please let us know in the comments.
You Might Also Be Interested In
- Security, Sales and Leadership Led the Way at CompTIA EMEACon 2023
- TubbTalk 134: The Best Cybersecurity Resources for MSPs You Need to Be Aware Of
- Tubbservatory Round-Up #20 – August 2023
I'm a small business owner, technical writer and blogger, with 15 years experience in corporate IT. I frequently attend MSP peer groups and create content relevant to IT service providers and business owners.
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