In the first three years of its MSP Foundation project, Kaspersky has achieved fourfold growth in sales among its managed service providers. In addition, the number of active partners has increased three and a half times since 2018, with significant growth in countries within Europe, North America, and South Africa. The introduction of a flexible pay-as-you-go monthly subscription payment plan, user-friendly License Management Portal for partners, and multi-layer cybersecurity product stack has made the Kaspersky MSP program attractive and beneficial for service providers.
The MSP market is expected to double in the next few years, growing from $243.33 billion in 2021 to $557.10 billion in 2028. It is not only an increase in a client base that the majority of MSPs reported but also a focus on expanding their service portfolio, as a recent global survey of service providers revealed. With data breaches, cloud adoption and other unsolved security challenges named by clients in the study, IT security services have been gaining weight and becoming the ‘must have’ in MSPs’ service portfolios.
Kaspersky’s focus on MSPs is in line with the global trend. Between 2019 – 2021, Kaspersky increased MSP sales to four times their starting point – with 75% year-on-year growth shown in 2021. As a part of this global initiative, many regions demonstrated significant growth, including France, Italy, Northern and Central Europe, North America, Russia, Africa, and Brazil.
As well as actively attracting new partners, these results were achieved by securing a solid retention rate, meaning Kaspersky’s MSP partners stay with the company for a long time.
Within the MSP Foundation project, Kaspersky developed tools that automate billing processes and facilitate business interactions between partners and vendors. With a dedicated partner program and License Management Portal introduced in 2020, MSPs were given adaptive financial conditions with flexible daily billing. They can now quickly and easily manage licenses in a self-service portal and bring security services to the market faster with a cost-efficient approach. The new pay-as-you-go subscription plan allows MSPs to benefit from an OPEX model and to alter license conditions whenever their customers require, which means paying only for what they need at that moment.
Another area that ensured success of the MSP Foundation project was the development and adaptation of Kaspersky’s portfolio to service providers of various sizes, security expertise levels and verticals they cover. Kaspersky products allow MSPs to automatically safeguard customers’ endpoints and cloud workloads from threats. Moreover, products such as Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response Optimum, and Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response also arm MSPs’ internal security teams with detection and investigation tools along with analytical expert power, knowledge, and assistance in providing services. The portfolio also includes products which help MSPs to provide specialized security for embedded devices such as ATM and POS in finance and banking, along with protection of industrial control systems (ICS). MSPs can customize their services for clients using various tiers and products while operating from one console in the cloud.
Kaspersky will continue investing in MSP businesses following the success of the MSP Foundation three-year project. The company plans to introduce more products and services specifically for security service providers (MSSPs), as well as continue to support a cloud-first approach and automation of many routine operations and integrate more products into a unified MSP-ready single management platform.
“We really value that Kaspersky creates true partnerships. It’s 100% channel-oriented and proactively invites us to participate in sales, marketing and sponsorship initiatives and technical training. Another result of working closely with Kaspersky over the years is that it constantly helps us build a depth of cybersecurity knowledge and understanding,” says Dan Driezen, Professional Services Manager, ESW IT Business Advisors.
“This is a very attractive model that allows us to serve small customers with reasonable, competitive prices. This has positive effects for everyone. The corresponding License Management Portal (LMP) has been around for almost a year and offers everything we need to manage our licenses, to book or cancel, scale up or down – everything can be done in such an easy and independent way. Self-service is very important here,” adds Vincenzo Biasi, Managing Director, levigo systems.
“We’ve come a long way and our partners note this. Our efforts have been recognized with an MSP Innovation Award in the category of Best Managed Services Partner (MSP) Program,” says Veniamin Levtsov, VP Corporate Business at Kaspersky. “For further MSP development, we will focus even more on process automation, portal functionality enhancement, and aligning more products with the MSP-readiness concept. These initiatives will support the great promise of transforming our resellers into managed security service partners.”
