Out of the estimated 40,000 MSPs in the United States, an estimated 10,000 are MSSPs, managed security service providers. These companies devote their time to understanding the security services required to secure their customers, using a huge range of tools. Indeed, cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing areas of increased IT spending, and for good reason: Businesses need high-quality protection from an increased array of malicious actors. And it’s not just in the United States that MSSPs are found. They exist around the world to fill a variety of niches.
Yet there is a growing problem for MSSPs: increased competition in the market. As more businesses explore the security services market, drawn by the lucrative profits and the increasing inability of businesses to identify, manage and secure their data and services, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate your business in the minds of the consumer. This is a problem that must be solved.
The Evolving Cybersecurity Landscape
At Wildix, we talk a lot about how positioning and specialization have major benefits for your business. And that’s definitely the case with the MSSP market — on its own, the market will be worth around $53.2 billion by the end of 2031, according to Transparency Market Research. So positioning yourself as a security company will enable you to capture sales more effectively.
The average MSSP has 36 solutions in their security stack as of 2024, up from 18 just two years ago. This marks the complexity of the landscape, where solutions are becoming increasingly separate to solve complex problems. Even a few years ago, an MSSP might start with the following:
- Endpoint detection
- Firewall with intrusion detection/prevention
- Email protection
- DNS filtering
- Patch management
- Disk encryption
But now they need far more than this. Solutions could involve:
- Managed detection and response
- Vulnerability management
- Privileged account management
- Threat hunting
- User training
- Application control/whitelisting
- 2FA/MFA
- Disaster recovery
There’s so much more that could be included, depending on the needs of the end-user. However, that gives you an idea as to how the security stack has grown for MSSPs and why they’re so valuable (not to mention how they can set up policies that help create strong internal security).
Part of this is due to increasingly specialized threats for businesses of all sizes, along with an improved understanding of how those threats affect businesses. Insurance companies are also driving business for these solutions as they are increasingly refusing to cover basic issues that could be solved with a decent security stack. The combination drives business.
The Problem With the MSSP Model
There’s no doubt that MSSPs are valuable. Yet there is a huge problem with the overall model: Customers increasingly want to get all their services from a single source. That’s because technology is becoming so complex that it requires a dedicated company to provide the various forms of technology that businesses need. However, from a business point of view, would you want to find multiple trusted advisers to deliver all the different stacks of technology? That creates a lot of risk, and in many markets, it can be hard to find the right combination of companies to provide the technologies that you need.
As a result, many prefer to go with a single dedicated provider that has a slightly simpler technology stack than multiple providers with the exact technologies they need. This means that if you’re a dedicated MSSP, you lose out if you only offer security services.
And for some providers, that’s a trade-off: They focus on their security stack so they can offer the best possible service to their end users. But there’s little point in doing this if those end users do not recognize the service they provide — and as with most technology products, very few end users can tell the difference between a good security stack and a bad one. Or one that covers all their needs vs. one that covers most of them. This is primarily due to the increased complexity of the MSSP space.
Compounding this is the fact that any solution that your MSSP doesn’t control is automatically a security risk. While it’s fine (generally) to have a standard office productivity suite or Adobe Creative Cloud — major software companies that tend to be easy to secure — solutions that affect the background systems of your business can be problematic. And that is especially true for third-party VoIP and communications technologies.
The MSSP model is not a winning combination anymore.
How Can MSSPs Fill In the Gap?
The solution is fairly obvious to us: Invest in connectivity to bolster your services.
While you want to keep your security stack separate from your connectivity stack (lines, hardware, VoIP, mobile and so on), you need solutions that easily integrate into each other for a secure ecosystem. This means a VoIP product that has a secure-by-design ethos, not one where security is just layered on top. It saves you time and energy — especially when 2FA and MFA are built in.
And don’t forget hardware that’s fit for purpose — phones, headsets and other solutions that make setting up these systems simple. Add in a SIP trunk, and you’re ready to go with a full UCaaS solution.
The beauty of a solution such as Wildix is that it’s highly flexible, allowing you to add the products you need while delivering the security and reliability your customers require. All this results in a solution that simply works for your needs — and your techs can quickly learn the basics with a couple of days’ training.
When your customers need security services, they can get everything else they require from a single point of contact. This gives you the ability to upsell your services while keeping control of your customers and the solutions you use. The result is growth, increased margin and the peace of mind of knowing your clients are safe and secure.
Without connectivity and the shift to becoming a full-service MSP, you’ll lose out to more organized competition that can deliver all the services your clients need from a single point of contact.
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