By Stephan Tallent
Sr. Director, MSSP & Service Enablement at Fortinet
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprise workers around the globe have had to adapt to full-time telework environments in order to maintain business functions. Even as we begin to transition to a new normal, the cultural impact of widespread remote work will remain. 38% of employees expect their companies to expand their remote work policies, meaning that telework will likely stay in place for some time.
For MSSPs, this presents an opportunity to support their customers’ remote work initiatives while ensuring that they have programs in place that allow for ongoing business continuity.
The Telework Opportunity
As more customers adopt longer term remote work policies, MSSPS are in a prime position to enable secure transitions to full-time telework environments. MSSPs should focus on providing customers with services that secure hosted applications and work-from-home users.
During these times of uncertainty, MSSPs can also offer insights to help customers scale their remote workforce without compromising security. This can be achieved by expanding their current SD-WAN, SD-Branch, and public cloud service offerings.
Leveraging Existing Resources to Bolster Telework Strategies
Over the past few months, customers have had to modify their networks and cut costs to ensure business continuity. With the groundwork now laid, customers must take additional steps to convert their makeshift solutions into reliable and secure business-ready strategies.
Below are three ways MSSPs can leverage security solutions to help their customers address key challenges with remote work.
Cloud Migration Security
To account for new working conditions, many customers accelerated their transition to the cloud without adequate planning. This resulted in organizations connecting to cloud environments without proper visibility, access control, or data protocols in place. Another area of concern is how customers transferred their workloads to the cloud. Many relied on the “lift and shift” approach, which can result in long-term security and compliance issues. By offering their expertise in this area, MSSPs can help customers avoid potential vulnerabilities within cloud migrations.
Cloud Security Assessments as a Service
When implementing cloud solutions, customers must be able to protect against the risks associated with application and infrastructure configuration and the use of APIs. The problem is that many organizations do not have access to the talent or resources needed to identify or address vulnerabilities in their cloud systems.
To address this challenge, MSSPs can offer cloud security assessments as a service. By using assessments to evaluate data security, threat detection, and compliance processes, MSSPs can provide customers with visibility into the strength of their cloud security programs. Along with identifying risk and threat activity across cloud environments, these assessments also offer insight regarding how to address configuration challenges. Having a posture management system in place enables customers to automate their remediation efforts and gives MSSPs a way to measure the value they add to customer deployments.
Ensuring Business Continuity with SD-WAN
The transition to telework has highlighted the importance of having business continuity strategies in place when creating remote work programs. With SD-WAN, customers can enable integrated operations that bolster security and performance across multiple remote locations.
When working from home, customers are likely to rely on branch networks that may have not been secured to company standards. MSSPs can take advantage of this opportunity by leveraging SD-WAN combined with Fortinet switches and APs to enable security functionality within existing branch edge hardware. This will enhance work-from-home and branch security while also presenting customer executives with opportunities to lower costs.
Fortinet Telework Solutions
It is more important than ever that MSSPs and Fortinet partners take advantage of the capabilities that are built into their customers’ existing solutions. To support customers who are looking to further strengthen their full-time remote workforce strategy, partners should leverage cloud components within the Security Fabric.
Additional teleworker solutions such as FortiAuthenticator, FortiCWP, Secure SD-WAN, and SD-Branch can also be integrated for those customers who are in are in a financial position to build out their security portfolios. For partners, Fortinet’s suite of teleworker solutions facilitates business growth and allows for streamlined operations during these uncertain times.
Fortinet also provides partners with additional resources that can help grow business opportunities and expand one’s knowledge of various network security concepts. Resources include technical guidance, templates, cookbooks, training, and certifications. Additionally, with Fortinet’s Fast Track workshop, MSSPs can gain firsthand experience with a variety of Fortinet solutions so that they can expand their service offerings to better meet customers’ needs.
Final Thoughts
SD-WAN and cloud connectivity solutions provide partners and MSSPs with a great opportunity to assist their customers looking to establish, maintain, or extend their remote workforce. With Fortinet, partners have access to the resources they need to establish integrated cloud and SD-WAN operations across their customers’ distributed networks. By leveraging Fortinet teleworker solutions, partners and MSSPs can maximize their customers’ existing security infrastructure while also making additional network improvements where needed.
