As IT increasingly moves to the cloud, what role should today’s mature MSP play in protecting against data breaches for clients with the aid of vital security policies such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)?

To gather opinions from across the industry, Augmentt conducted some informal research in November of 2021. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of the view that today’s capable MSP should play a leading role in not just educating clients but also in enabling and managing MFA and other security policies in a deeper, more evolved, and more lucrative type of client partnership.

The vital need for widespread MFA adoption is a great example of where proactive MSPs can guide and advise clients toward a far more advanced security posture. According to Microsoft, MFA alone can prevent 99% of data breaches but only 11% of employees and 22% of IT admins have the protocol enabled.

So, are MSPs working in our cloud-centric era responsible for helping clients set up appropriate M365 security policies such as MFA and for monitoring the strength of these policies?

In our informal research, 95% of respondents said yes, including Dale Walls, who added, “It was always my philosophy that the MSP emulates an internal IT person for a client. So if you were responsible for the operation and security of the IT systems, would you not be responsible to take care that these things were attended to proactively?”

Just how badly is MFA needed? Microsoft reports that 1.2 million M365 accounts are breached every month, something that makes the monitoring of MFA adoption all the more critical across all devices and points of entry. As an industry insider, Evan Moore said, “There is no reason out of date browsers, jailbroken phones, or old operating systems should be used to access the company’s crown jewels.”

Where Augmentt Secure enters the picture

The rich opportunity is there for MSPs — and now so are the leading-edge tools. Augmentt’s new Secure product means MSPs can now proactively audit, monitor, manage and report on all M365 security threats and security policies, including MFA. Augmentt Secure is probably the easiest and most significant opportunity for MSPs to grow their security services and win new customers. Will they seize the opportunity?

In our research, 100% of MSPs said that they were planning to grow and scale security services in 2022 to meet this growing demand and to help enable more sophisticated approaches that organizations need for cloud security today and tomorrow.

Security professional Paul Lopez noted how “Getting off the ‘password model’ is one of the most important security steps an organization can take. MFA has come a long way in recent years — done right, it’s reliable, easy to deploy, and extremely secure.”

MSPs moving forward in this manner not only makes good business sense, but it may also end up being necessary for survival. Industry media and analysts seem united in the belief that the conventional IT department will soon be obsolete and that cloud-savvy MSPs are positioned to become “the orchestrators of IT,” as one observer put it, but will they be prepared to keep pace?

“They aren’t going to be in business long if they don’t,” predicted industry observer Hunter Nelson.