Earlier this year, we introduced the LimaCharlie SecOps Cloud Platform (SCP). The SCP is a unified platform for modern cybersecurity operations. Similar to what the public cloud did for IT, the SCP offers security teams core cybersecurity capabilities and infrastructure: on-demand, pay-per-use, and API-first.

In short, the SCP is a new paradigm for cybersecurity. It’s a game-changer for enterprise security teams and cybersecurity solutions builders. But the SCP will also help managed security services providers (MSSPs), managed detection and response (MDR) providers, and incident response (IR) firms to compete more effectively—even against security organizations many times their size.

Pain points faced by MSSPs today

The market for managed security services is extremely promising. According to a recent McKinsey forecast, the current global cybersecurity market has as much as $2 trillion of growth potential—and MSSP and MDR providers account for around half of that potential.

But there are some serious stumbling blocks for MSSPs that want to grow their business—mostly due to the fact that the cybersecurity industry is still operating under an outdated model. This manifests in several ways:

• MSSPs rely on tools provided by large cybersecurity vendors. These tools are hard to customize and can be frustratingly opaque. The sales process at legacy vendors is slow, cumbersome, and inflexible.

• Service providers attempting to provide tailored services to clients must often purchase one-off solutions in order to meet a narrow need. The end result is tool sprawl and budget bloat.

• MSSPs today are forced to stitch together a patchwork of incompatible tools and infrastructure. Security operations have become complex, expensive, and very hard to scale.

• Large cybersecurity vendors often have their own managed services offerings. In effect, smaller MSSPs find themselves forced to rely on products sold by their competition.

• MSSPs seeking greater control and customization sometimes attempt to assemble solutions using open-source technologies. However, they often end up getting bogged down in maintaining their infrastructure and encounter problems when they want to scale.

The core premise behind the SecOps Cloud Platform is that there is a better way to do cybersecurity. MSSPs that adopt the SCP experience this firsthand—and find that the platform’s benefits translate directly into competitive advantage.

“We can automate a significant portion of the tasks needed to operate the platform on a day-to-day basis, in a way that is scalable, repeatable, and self-documenting, using LimaCharlie’s APIs to do the heavy lifting.” -Paul Ihme, Co-founder and Managing Principal, Soteria

8 ways MSSPs can leverage the SCP to compete more effectively

1. Centralize telemetry data and security operations in one platform The SCP allows MSSPs to bring all of their telemetry data (regardless of source) into the platform, normalize that data to a common JSON data format, and run everything through a powerful Detection, Automation, and Response Engine. The result is true single-pane-of-glass visibility—and the opportunity to consolidate tools and ensure consistent security operations at scale.

2. Leverage the SCP’s automation capabilities for SecOps at scale The SCP is designed to enable an engineering-centric approach to cybersecurity operations. Built from the ground up for security automation at scale, the SCP offers MSSPs a unique opportunity to gain operational leverage. The platform lets teams define and execute automated actions based on telemetry data—eliminating manual tasks, reducing alert fatigue, and freeing up security professionals to spend their time on higher-value tasks.

3. Simplify and standardize security operations with a multi-tenant architecture The SCP has a multi-tenant architecture and advanced role-based access control capabilities. This gives MSSPs significant operational benefits—in particular, the ability to efficiently manage multiple organizations in a single platform and subdivide client environments in an extremely fine-grained way. The SCP allows MSSPs to spin up pre-configured tenants in seconds, roll out changes to many clients at scale using infrastructure as code, and create multiple environments as needed.

4. Build custom offerings and control your workflows with open APIs The SCP takes an API-first approach. We believe that security professionals know best what they need to implement for their organizations. For MSSPs, the SCP’s open APIs mean an unprecedented level of control over their cybersecurity tools and workflows. This customizability allows MSSPs to build bespoke service offerings for their clients. And perhaps even more importantly, this level of control means MSSPs can modify their cybersecurity tools to better suit their security workflows—instead of having to change their workflows to accommodate a vendor’s tool.

5. Add capabilities without adding vendors The SCP is a unified platform for modern security operations with a catalog of over 100 cybersecurity capabilities and integrations (and growing). This makes it easy for MSSPs to scale up their service offerings as needed—either organizationally or with an individual client. If a client asks for a new capability or service, the SCP makes it possible to say “yes” without having to worry about taking on a new tool or platform.

6. Take control of telemetry data and reduce spending on high-cost tools The SCP allows MSSPs to import security telemetry data from any source and output it to any destination. This gives service providers an unmatched observability pipeline for all of their data. And because the SCP offers extremely fine-grained data routing, it can also be used to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to high-cost SIEM tools—a savings MSSPs can either reinvest in their business or pass on to their clients.

7. Save money, threat hunt retroactively, and ensure compliance with free telemetry storage The SCP offers one year of free telemetry data storage for the cost of ingestion. All data is stored in a rich, fully searchable format. For MSSPs, this helps to ensure compliance and lowers the cost of data storage associated with expensive data lakes and gives you the ability to run retroactive threat hunts, detections, and baselines against that data.

8. Take advantage of a public cloud pricing model Unlike legacy cybersecurity vendors, the SCP does not require contracts, capacity planning, or price modeling. Similar to the IT public cloud, everything is available on-demand. Pricing is pay-per-use, fully transparent, and completely predictable. This means that MSSPs can scale up or down as needed without ever having to talk to a salesperson. The resulting flexibility helps service providers take on new business with confidence, change the scope of an existing deployment without worrying about unexpected costs, and onboard new clients faster than ever. The SCP also provides pure usage-based billing options. MSSPs can pre-deploy EDR sensors in “sleeper mode” to client environments. The dormant sensors cost very little but can be activated at a moment’s notice—enabling incident responders to offer their clients extremely competitive SLAs.

Work with a partner, not a competitor

The SCP and its unique approach to cybersecurity offer many competitive advantages to service providers. But one of the biggest upsides of this new paradigm is that when MSSPs adopt the SCP, they are no longer working with a potential competitor.

To the contrary: The LimaCharlie SCP is simply a cloud provider of tooling and infrastructure for cybersecurity teams. We see ourselves, first and foremost, as a partner. As our CEO and founder Maxime Lamothe-Brassard says:

We are 100% a technology company and do not compete with the people and companies we provide tools and infrastructure for. We are vendor-neutral providers of tools and infrastructure for security professionals. We believe that this on-demand and engineering-centric approach is the way to move the industry forward.

In fact, we even offer an MSSP Partner program for MSSPs that want to take advantage of joint marketing opportunities, customer referrals, and our team of business and technical advisors.

Learn more about how the SCP benefits MSSPs

To see how the SCP can make your organization more competitive, try it for free or book a demo today.

To hear from managed service providers who are already using the SCP to grow their businesses, watch the service provider panel discussion at our recent live event.