Cybersecurity for MSPs

Intro: Cybersecurity for MSP’s

This article was written based on a discussion of what resources and ways MSPs can help the protection of their customers. The text has been transcribed from an interview between John Shedd and David McHale of HailBytes.

What Are Some Ways That MSPs Can Protect Their Clients From Cybersecurity Threats?

MSPs are seeing a ton of phishing scams and they’re trying to figure out how they can protect their customers. 

One of the hardest parts of protecting customers is actually convincing them that protecting against phishing scams is important to do. 

One of the ways that I’ve found that has worked very well for the MSPs we work with has been to find stories that are as similar as possible to the client that they are trying to persuade and to tell those stories of phishing scams. 

It is important to fill clients in on the details of whether the phishing scam was by email or SMS and how easily they were targeted.

It’s effective to tell the client why the phishing attack happened, but it’s even more important to tell them how it can be prevented. 

Very often the preventative measures are technology agnostic and they’re as simple as training those users and making sure that they are aware of common attacks they’re keeping up with the trends. 

A lot of the roles that the MSP plays in that circumstance is less of a technology vendor for the client and more of a trusted advisor and an educator. 

What resources can an MSP give to their clients? 

The challenge of working with small businesses is that they don’t necessarily have somebody that does IT or maybe they do and their hands are usually full.

In essence, the MSP can give tools to small businesses to make cybersecurity easy on the client. 

One of the most common things that we see is that MSPs go in and they’ll do in-person training. Sometimes they’ll go out to a client site, and they’ll take an hour every quarter or an hour every year, and basically run through training with that client as a value-added service. 

There are a few problems with in-person training though.

It can be difficult in terms of travel. I’ve worked with some MSPs who are working just in one state, but I’ve also worked with some MSPs who have clients all over the country. 

What Are Some Free Resources That MSPs Can Use?

One resource that we have for MSPs is the  MSP Cybersecurity Survival Guide. This is a free resource to give your clients and have them empower client education. 

We’ve put together some video trainings that we found very effective for clients. Video training can be more engaging than written word a lot of the time. 

Posters can be very effective. Sans puts out a lot of really great posters and Hailbytes has a few different posters as well.

Hailbytes also distributes booklets from the FTC and SBA and US Cert, and the Department of Homeland Security, that tackle some of the common scams and common issues. 

We’ll often mail those resources out to MSPs for them to pass on to their clients as well.

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