FUTURE TECHNOLOGY
Achieving
compliance
certifications
is a long-drawn
process but
nevertheless a
necessity.
Mudar Al-Ani, COO BT Al Saudia.
day-to-day navigation processes. With IT
skills becoming more crucial and quite
often in limited numbers as well as quality,
managed service providers must be able to
automate efficiently.
Managed security service providers
offer real-time threat intelligence
technology to identify advanced malware
attacks, persistent threats, and malicious
attacks. “Research driven managed
security service providers, will use a
threat laboratory in multiple countries to
perform deep and continuous research on
advanced threats. The benefit is having
a managed security service provider that
invests in people and technology each year
into detecting and analysing global threats
using threat intelligence inside a real
intelligence laboratory,” says Dave from
ProVise Secure Lab.
NXN provides qualified technology
experts and consultants to help manage
challenging security risks. “Our managed
security services operational model helps
entities protect and prevents against
threat through effective response via
collaboration between agencies with
shared geographic-based information
system, reduction of dispatch time and
filtration of false alarms. Such a model
helps customers with savings on capex
and reduces opex by avoiding investment
in complex technology platforms, training
and management of the service, and
reduces operational costs through smart
management” says Charif from NXN.
While some companies may opt to be
niche players in managed security services,
26
others choose to add the practice to an
already existing managed services business
model. “eHosting DataFort has been in the
cloud hosting and managed infrastructure
market for a long time and we have seen
the huge demand for managed security
services over the last few years. In our
case it was a natural progression towards
building a managed security services
practice, to offer our customers, and to tap
into the growing potential customer base,”
explains eHosting DataFort’s Zeineldin.
“Given that security is a highly sensitive
area of business, to build a good managed
security services practice, organisations
primarily must strengthen trust within
existing and potential customers. This is
Once you
have crossed
breakeven,
further increase
in customers
revenue,
does not have
proportionate
increase in
internal cost.
especially important, as the customer is
placing critical data with the provider,”
continues Zeineldin.
For BT Al Saudia, a differentiator
comes with the support that is offered,
since its service level agreements
are aggressive. “Additionally, we are
facilitating the payments on monthly and
quarterly basis, assisting our customers
to change over to an opex model, with
the benefits of long term customer
commitment and support coming from
our contracts and service level agreements.
This will make our managed security
services model more appealing and thus
increase our customer base and return
from the service,” says Mudar Al-Ani at BT
Al Saudia.
Help AG’s Khan points out that the
first requirement for success is to be able
to deliver the services locally. “This is
one of the biggest factors in addressing
a customer’s security concerns, but
also requires a tremendous amount
of investment both in developing the
infrastructure and manpower. Even with
this in place, as managed services are only
now starting to gain traction, it would take
at least a couple years before managed
service providers see a full return on
investment. Furthermore, many of the
existing managed service providers have a
lot of trouble delivering the correct service
level to their customers. While the managed
service providers may have a portfolio
ready today, the issue is quite often
inflexibility in the portfolio and services.”
Khan continues, that it is important to
understand, “Managed security services
requires significant initial investment in
setting up the required infrastructure and
getting the right people on-board to be
able to run 24x7 operations, even before
signing on a single customer. As this
cycle is long, managed service providers
should be prepared to not expect any ROI
in the initial two to three years.” Once
you have crossed breakeven, further
increase in customers revenue, does not
have proportionate increase in internal
cost, thereby making this business model
more interesting and profitable, Khan
summarises on a positive note.
Issue 16
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS