Q&A: The 'Best Security Offering' for MSPs in 2020

The evolving cyberthreat landscape has made security the top priority for businesses of all sizes. More than ever, it has become imperative for MSPs to incorporate managed security service offerings in their portfolio to continue to succeed and differentiate themselves from their competition.

Barracuda MSP was honored to be recently recognized with the ‘Best Security Offering’ award at the 2020 MSP Innovation Awards hosted by Channel Partner Insights. Barracuda is excited to be a part of many of MSP partners’ journey to fulfilling the security needs for their customers.

I caught up with Christopher Crellin, Senior Director, Product Management at Barracuda MSP, to speak with him on what this award means and how he sees Barracuda can continue to provide the best security offering to MSPs.

Q&A with Chris Crellin

Q: In your view, what security services do MSPs need to include in their offerings to secure their customers in today’s threat landscape?

Today’s cyberattacks are getting ever more sophisticated. Couple that with a rapidly evolving threat landscape and the new dynamics of a much more remote workforce, and it’s become clear that MSPs need to create and deliver managed security services that offer multi-layered protection for their customers.

It needs to include end-user security awareness training and endpoint security services that go beyond just antivirus, email security, network security with remote access capabilities, and backup and disaster recovery. Now more than ever, MSPs must deliver a cohesive security strategy to keep their customers’ business operations safe.

Q: What do you think made Barracuda MSP stand out to win the Best Security Offering award?

With over 15 years of expertise in providing cybersecurity to over 200,000 global customers, security is in Barracuda’s DNA. We draw from our experience, our partners, and our R&D capacity to deliver innovative, purpose-built security offerings to MSPs that are easy-to-deploy and easy-to-manage.

One of our recent innovations is the introduction of an AI-based threat detection solution for the growing number of businesses using Microsoft Office 365 or other cloud-based applications, Barracuda Sentinel, to prevent successful attacks from advanced threats such as phishing and account takeover. With Barracuda’s security solutions, MSPs can easily create and deliver security services that their customers want and need.

Along with our best-in-class products, being a trusted partner is also very important to MSPs. After all, it is the MSP’s brand that is at risk if something goes wrong at their customer’s site. Barracuda MSP’s partner program empowers MSP partners to effectively market, sell, and support our solutions with exclusive partner success resources, dedicated partner account managers, and a sales and marketing enablement resource hub. We truly believe that our MSP partner’s success is our success.

Q: Can you share some of the upcoming innovations coming from Barracuda MSP?

We will continue to innovate to prevent threats from exploiting vulnerabilities at our customers’ sites with our multi-layered security portfolio. For instance, with email being the top attack vector, we look to further enhance our email security capabilities to ensure our customers are protected from advanced threats like spear-phishing and account takeover.

On top of enhancing our security portfolio, Barracuda MSP will continue to improve the ease-of-use, ease-of-management, and ease-of-growing the MSP partners’ business. Take Barracuda Managed Workplace as an example. Barracuda MSP launched Managed Workplace in February 2019 after acquiring the security-centric remote monitoring and management platform for MSPs.

In the past year, we have been working on integrating Managed Workplace within the Barracuda product line, such as the integration with Barracuda Content Shield, an advanced web security solution, and enhancing backup and monitoring policies with Intronis Backup. In addition to our integration work, we also introduced new capabilities by adding Advanced Software Management, an automated third-party patch management solution, to the Managed Workplace portfolio.

Furthermore, we have added and are continuing to add services for MSPs that they can roll out and scale delivery of by outsourcing to our team of experts. We are innovating not just in technology, but in the model which MSPs can leverage to scale their business.