A question of trust for MSPs and their customers
Since time immemorial (well, for about 40 years or so), channel partners have frequently been described as “the middlemen” between vendors and customers. Nowadays, you could also describe some of them as “middlewomen”.
Sometimes the phrase was used disparagingly, implying that partners had created an unnatural, inefficient and expensive barrier between vendors and customers. Certainly, that was the rhetoric deployed by those “direct” vendors who emerged in the wake of Dell’s success in the 80s and 90s. Not many of them left now.
That’s not to say that being the middle person was completely advantageous for partners. True, they owned the relationship with the customer, but they were in that position because they’d worked for it. They’d built and nurtured that relationship, developed a good understanding of the customer’s business and benefited from being seen as able to offer impartial advice.
Unlike vendors, channel partners were not tied to one product line when it came to making recommendations to their customers. They weren’t exactly neutral, however, and no one ever believed they were. Nobody could be completely impartial because no channel partner would be able to supply and support all the available products from all the available vendors. But they were believed to be able to provide a wider range of advice, products and support than individual vendors could.
But the problem with being the person in the middle is that you can often get the blame from either end of the chain when something goes wrong. You are also the person likely to be left carrying the can or at least making excuses for the failures of the supplier, even when those failures are completely out of your control.
There’s no such thing as “just the middleman”.
The evolution of partners to become managed service providers (MSPs) is the latest progression in the channel’s role as the person in the middle. But what’s interesting about this version is that it creates a level of vulnerability for the channel partner that hadn’t existed until now. A recent story in MicroScope reported remarks by Adam Khan, vice-president of global security operations at Barracuda that highlighted this change.
Speaking of the potential for cyber threats and attack, he said: “MSPs are a pretty big target [as they] are managing large stacks of customers. An MSP can be tied into hundreds or thousands of organisations.”
But while MSPs are a target because a breach could allow cyber criminals and malicious actors to gain access to their customers (and suppliers), individual customers are also targets as a means to access MSPs and their wider customer base.
As a consequence, according to Barracuda MSP vice-president of extended detection and response (XDR) sales, JP Kehoe, many MSPs “will not accept the customer now unless they have a basic set of controls in place. Getting a baseline is something we’re definitely seeing in the UK market. standardising across ‘good’ and then giving ‘better’ and ‘best’ options to customers as they move up the stack”.
It’s understandable that partners, in the guise of MSPs, should be concerned about the security of customers, given their position as the people in the middle between customers and vendors. A lot is said about “trust” in the relationship between partners and customers. Partners have long been known and praised as trusted advisors by their customers so it’s intriguing when trust becomes a commodity that partners seek from their customers rather than vice versa.
We’ve reached the point where the trusted advisors need to ensure they have trusted customers. Underlying all this, of course, is the stuff they have in common that makes them all vulnerable: technology. But we could argue forever about the chicken and egg situation regarding greater adoption of IT and the huge growth in the number of security vulnerabilities that come with it. That’s a conversation for another day.
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