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Multi-layered security is a network security approach that uses a number of components to protect your clients' operations with multiple levels of security measures.
As a managed service provider (MSP), you want to offer customers best-in-class services while differentiating yourself from the competition and increasing your company’s profitability. Offering your customers a multi-layered security approach can provide the cornerstone for achieving all of these objectives.
How Multi-Layered Network Protection Works
The purpose of including multiple layers in your network security is to help ensure that each single defense component has a backup in the case of a flaw or missing coverage. The individual strengths of each layer also cover any gaps that other defenses may have.
With this assumption in mind, each individual layer in a multi-layered security approach focuses on a specific area where vulnerabilities may exist. By working in concert, these layers of security offer a better chance of stopping intruders from breaching company networks than using a single solution.
The types of security layers you can use in your network defense include:
- Web protection
- Patch management
- Email security and archiving
- Vulnerability assessment and analytics
- Antivirus software
- Data encryption
- Firewalls
- Digital certificates
- Anti-spam and spam filters
- Privacy controls
Having multiple layers of security in place is crucial for MSPs who protect data at all levels and across numerous applications and devices. Not only should data stay safe, but so should the methods of communication and the network where information is transferred.
Defense in Depth vs. Multi-Layered Security
While these two terms are often used together, defense in depth is a term that refers to a security strategy designed more to slow or hinder security threats until they can be fully neutralized or turned away.
While multi-layered security comes from the idea of using multiple security measures to protect your system against threats, defense in depth incorporates the idea that there's no real way to achieve total security against these threats. Therefore, the defense in depth security strategy instead focuses on hindering the progress of a threat until it is no longer a danger.
Choosing the Right Vendor
After you convince your customers of the benefits of layered security, the next challenge is to deploy an all-inclusive strategy that utilizes the right tools.
With multi-layered security solutions from SolarWinds MSP (formerly LOGICnow), your clients can rest easy knowing all their systems are protected. With MSP RMM, we make it easy to virtually monitor your clients’ data on the network, server, application, and file level with our automated monitoring capability.
SolarWinds MSP's layered security platform delivers the most comprehensive IT security solution available today, giving you and your customers the best in proactive, detective, and reactive security:
- Proactive security is designed to stop threats before they start.
- Detective security is designed to catch emerging threats as they pop up.
- Reactive security is designed to recover systems and data quickly if a threat manages to circumvent other security measures.
Together, the different layers form a perimeter of protection to deliver unparalleled security, efficiency, and ease of use for MSPs and customers alike. With MSP RMM, you can stop using disparate security solutions from multiple vendors and enjoy the efficiency and productivity that comes from accessing a single solution in a single pane of glass.
Patch Management
Cyber attackers typically search for the easiest way to breach a network. Often, this involves pinpointing “soft targets,” such as software that has not yet been updated to protect against known malware.
MSP RMM’s patch management solution handles every facet of patching on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. It discovers relevant and essential service packs, security updates and other hotfixes, and then installs them on the appropriate machines.
Automating these tasks ensures that customer hardware and software stay up to date while eliminating the need for you to perform these tasks manually.
The patch management tasks you can automate include:
- Scanning computers, servers, and workstations at periodic intervals to discover missing patches
- Finding and downloading missing patches from the appropriate vendors' websites
- Downloading only the patches required by vendors or approved by companies in accordance with their corporate policies
- Downloading and installing required patches on specific computers
Managed Antivirus
Nearly every MSP will admit that antivirus applications are not enough on their own to combat the growing number of cyberattacks. Nevertheless, with antivirus vendors finding countless variations of malware every day, antivirus applications remain a requirement in a layered security solution.
MSP RMM uses Bitdefender in support of its antivirus layer. As a cloud-based solution, signature patterns are updated and deployed to customers automatically, ensuring your clients receive protection from the most current viruses, Trojans, and other malware on the cyber threat landscape.
Web Protection
MSP RMM’s web protection provides a safeguard from employees at your customers’ businesses who surf seemingly innocent sites that contain concealed malware. You can even use this layer to deny employees from accessing recreational, non-business, and non-productive sites, such as those used for gaming, social networking, and instant messaging, thereby increasing employee productivity.
Denying employees access to bandwidth-hungry sites frees up bandwidth while boosting the performance of business applications and network resources significantly.
Email Protection
Throughout the ebb and flow of technologies that seem popular one day and fall out of favor the next, the one constant upon which organizations continue to rely is email. Because email remains popular with businesses, email remains a big target that hackers use to breach security and gain access to a company’s valuable data assets.
MSP RMM’s email protection layer allows MSPs to spot patterns in large volumes of spam that can identify attacks directed at customers. A large number of emails sent to particular employees or departments, for example, might indicate attacks aimed at certain targets at a customer site.
For even greater protection, customers can elect to accept email only from the MSP’s cloud-based service.
Backup
MSP RMM’s backup and disaster recovery layer provides customers with the confidence that if their data should ever become compromised, corrupted, or deleted, it can be recovered safely and securely.
Local backup operations allow data to be recovered faster than remote backups from the cloud. However, some companies that are bound by preference, policy, or commitment to tight compliance standards (such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2) may require their data to be backed up to an offsite repository.
MSP RMM’s backup layer gives you the best of both worlds, allowing you to back up customer data locally and remotely.
Layered Security from SolarWinds MSPÂ at a Glance
The following table summarizes common concerns that can be remediated using layered security tools from SolarWinds MSP.
|
Concern |
Solution |
Business Proposition |
|
Layered security is costly and hard to justify. |
Use MSP Risk Intelligence to show customers the potential liability of breaches and lost data in the dollars-and-cents terms that make the most impact. |
The cost to adopt a layered security solution is far less expensive than the cost to recover from breaches and compromised or corrupted data. |
|
Employees visit sites that are not work related—or are potentially harmful. |
Use SolarWinds MSP's Web Protection feature to create blacklists that block employees from such sites. |
Reduce the chance of introducing malware into the company network while boosting employee productivity at the same time. |
|
It’s hard to keep up with new malware threats. |
Use managed antivirus to get up-to-date malware detection. |
Because virus patterns are updated automatically, your customers are protected against the latest strains. |
|
Implementing software patches is too time consuming. |
Use patch management to automate the process and keep software secure. |
Software apps that have fallen behind with their updates may contain vulnerabilities that hackers look for to breach networks. Patch management can ensure that this does not happen to your customers. Plus, patch management can be automated, so you can update some or all customer computer systems automatically, with minimal intervention. |
|
Email is a ripe target for hackers. |
Mail protection from MSP RMM and MSP Mail Protection shuts down email-borne threats. |
Customers no longer have to deal with frequent email threats, keeping their inboxes clean and their network safe. |
|
How quickly can data be recovered after data is intentionally or accidentally deleted, or becomes corrupt? |
MSP Backup & Recovery brings systems and data back online in minutes. |
Customers can recover data rapidly at a cost-effective price point. |
Sign Up for a Free Trial
All our solutions deliver leading-edge capabilities designed to empower MSPs to deliver premium services to their customers, build powerful customer relationships, and grow their customer base.
Sign up for a free 30-day trial of SolarWinds RMM today.Â
About SolarWinds MSP
SolarWinds MSP delivers the only 100% SaaS, fully cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) platform, backed by collective intelligence and the highest levels of layered security. SolarWinds MSP’s products including SolarWinds Risk Intelligence, SolarWinds RMM, SolarWinds Backup, SolarWinds Mail Assure, MSP Manager, and SolarWinds Take Control–comprise the market’s most widely trusted integrated solution.
Deployed on millions of endpoints across hundreds of thousands of networks, the platform has the industry vision to define and deliver the future of the market. SolarWinds MSP provides the most comprehensive IT security available as well the first ever IT notification feature powered by prescriptive analytics and machine learning.
SolarWinds MSP’s passion is helping IT professionals secure and manage their systems and data through actionable insights, rewriting the rules of IT.
For more information, visit www.SolarWindsMSP.com.
