ChannelVision Magazine

“A rival company just happens to bid a little under the client, time after time,” recalls Roland CIO Ken Nix. After using user activity monitoring and user behavior analytics (UBA) software, “We discovered an individual at the client company whose spouse worked for the competitor. It became obvious the employee was leaking sensitive information about bids to his spouse. That software allows me to track something suspicious as it happens, sending me an alert and letting me play back the activ- ity for the last 30 days.” Nine in 10 companies feel vulnerable to insider threats, according to a 2018 survey of cybersecurity professionals by Crowd Re- search Partners, to say nothing of their expo- sure to outsider attacks such as ransomware. But that’s not the only thing the clients of man- aged service providers (MSPs) worry about. They’re concerned about the accidental, as well as deliberately malicious, extraction of sensitive information. They fret about em- ployees who aren’t pulling their weight. And, as contractors of various sorts, they want to make sure they are compliant with regulations in place, such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which safe- guards private medical information, and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technol- ogy), which manages cybersecurity risk. Increasingly, MSPs need to provide a full suite of vital services to clients, many of whom are too small to have an IT team to oversee the most dangerous threats to their business- By Larry Thompson Silent Partners R oland Technology Group, a managed IT services and consulting group operating out of Plano, Texas, had a client that was constantly losing contract bids and couldn’t figure out why. As clients demand more sophisticated services and better protection, MSPs must integrate with companies that offer complementary technologies channel management Channel Vision | July - August, 2018 46