Security is vital for small to midsize businesses, but they lack the security expertise, budgets, and staff with dedicated security expertise. At the same time, the lack of security expertise, smaller budgets, and the difficulties inherent in hiring and retaining dedicated security professionals is contributing to an ever-growing demand for managed security service providers (MSSPs). As a result, many traditional IT Service vendors are transitioning into MSSPs in order to provide SMBs with security services alongside their standard offerings.
At the same time, security vendors are challenged with enabling and arming their value-added resellers as they transition into managed security. MSSPs seeking best-in-class products and solutions from multiple vendors to provide security services to their customers can face significant hidden costs because of the TCO associated with deploying, managing, and maintaining joint solutions.
Ease of Deployment, Management, and Maintenance
WatchGuard delivers enterprise-grade security solutions that enable our Partners to make a smooth transition into managed security. To help reduce the total cost of ownership, apart from the bundled enterprise-grade security services, we focus on ensuring that our products and services co-exist in an ecosystem of solutions from other technology vendors. We gather continuous feedback and prioritization from our Partners to not only deliver best-in-class security with simplified setup and ongoing management, but to add value by integrating with technologies from other vendors through the WatchGuardONE Technology Partner Program.
The program invites leading technology vendors to integrate with WatchGuard solutions, delivering immediate benefits for both our Partners and their customers, especially MSSPs who combine multiple solutions. The ability to up-sell the combined services as a packaged security solution is a huge benefit. What’s more, WatchGuard ensures that these integrations are fully documented, validated, and certified, wherever applicable. This eliminates the overhead associated with building custom applications and interfaces to manage solutions from multiple vendors, and removes hidden costs associated with ensuring the combined solution has the most value.
Automated Security Management
WatchGuard has extended its Technology Partner Ecosystem to a leader in professional services automation – ConnectWise. The WatchGuard-ConnectWise certified integration automates the synchronization of security asset information, eliminating manual upkeep of important asset information as well as enabling MSSPs to stay ahead of security service expiration dates. It also goes above and beyond to provide differentiated, closed-loop ticketing into the service desk workflows that MSSPs use for proactive helpdesk notification and SLA management. This enables WatchGuard MSSP Partners to automate service desk and business workflows for their security offerings. This is available as an out-of-the-box option in the recent release of Fireware v11.12, and it requires no additional software or plugin to be installed.
Visit WatchGuard to learn more about the WatchGuard-ConnectWise integration and how WatchGuard simplifies security-as-a-service for MSSPs.