A cybersecurity platform for MSPs has to hold up against a constantly evolving threat baseline. Ransomware is now involved in 48% of breaches, and software vulnerabilities have overtaken stolen credentials as the top way attackers get in, according to the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Small organizations absorb most of it, with the Cyber Readiness Institute's read of the 2026 DBIR putting them at 96% of ransomware victims.
When it comes to preventing and protecting against these attacks, the load lands often on MSPs. Small and mid-sized businesses can rarely staff security functions of their own. They buy IT management and receive security as an assumed part of it. Outside demands point the same direction: insurance carriers underwrite on controls they can verify, primes flow compliance requirements down to subcontractors, and regulators expect evidence rather than assertion. Those requests reach the MSP because nobody else in the relationship can answer them.
Many MSPs have at least some facets of cybersecurity already baked into their stack. But, when providing cybersecurity at scale across an entire client base, it begs the question of a fully-fledged platform of security tools. This, in turn, raises more questions:
This guide addresses all four, but let’s begin with the concept of a cybersecurity platform for MSPs and how to identify it.
Most security products are built for a company defending itself: one tenant, one directory, one set of policies, one team that knows the environment. MSPs are defending multiple companies with multiple directories and unique risk appetites, fronted by owners whose main priority is their own business. Their differences (and similarities) are where MSP security economics live or die.
With so many clients to manage, swivel-chairing between point tools demands valuable time, time spent that can both eat into margins but also prove critical during security events. Enter, the cybersecurity platform. The word platform gets applied to anything with more than one feature, which makes it close to meaningless in a sales conversation. But, in practice, a cybersecurity platform proves incredibly useful to MSPs provided it meets three criteria.
Telemetry from network, endpoint, identity, and cloud has to land in a shared data layer where a detection can reason across all of it. An impossible-travel sign-in in Microsoft 365 and a suspicious process spawning on the same user's laptop are one incident. If your stack produces two alerts in two consoles and relies on an analyst noticing they share a username, correlation is happening in that analyst's head at 2 a.m., which is more often than not where it fails.
This is the difference that shows up in mean time to respond more than any other. Correlated detections arrive with the context already attached, so triage starts at "what do we do" rather than "what happened." Uncorrelated detections arrive as fragments, and the fragments that never get assembled are the ones that turn into incident response engagements.
Tenant boundaries have to be enforced by the product. A boundary that depends on a technician remembering which profile they are signed into is a procedural control, and procedural controls fail at volume. Ask what happens when a technician with access to thirty clients runs a search: does the product scope results, or does it trust the operator? Ask whether a policy change can be pushed to twelve clients at once and rolled back if it breaks something at the thirteenth.
The failure mode here is quiet and expensive. Cross-tenant mistakes rarely produce a breach. They produce client data appearing in the wrong report, which is a confidentiality problem with contractual weight and no good technical explanation.
A bundle is several products from one vendor on one invoice. Although seemingly good on paper, the benefit stops at your renewal calendar. If your analysts still pivot between four consoles to close one alert, you bought procurement convenience under the guise of “consolidation.”
The tell is the data model. Products that were acquired rather than built together usually keep separate data stores, separate agents, and separate alert pipelines behind a shared login page. Ask when each module shipped, whether they share an agent, and whether a detection can query telemetry from another module. Vendors answer that question quickly when the answer is good.
Arguments about coverage turn into arguments about vendor categories. A better starting point is the attacker's path: what they have to get through to reach a client's data. The list below follows that path.
Users are not behind your firewall anymore, and neither are the applications. Access control has to follow the identity and the device to whatever coffee shop, home office, or client site they are in. That is the case for Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, which collapses VPN, DNS filtering, egress control, segmentation, and traffic inspection into one enforcement point you manage per tenant.
The MSP value is segmentation you can apply without a truck roll. When a client's line-of-business server needs to be reachable by nine people and nobody else, that should be a policy change, not a weekend of firewall rules at a site you drive to. It also changes what a compromised laptop can reach, which is the difference between an endpoint incident and a client-wide outage.
Watch the failure behavior. Ask what happens to a user's connectivity when the access service is unreachable, because a security control that takes a client offline during an outage will be the first thing they ask you to remove.
Endpoint is where most incidents become visible and where most can be stopped. Signature-based antivirus alone has been insufficient for a decade. Modern coverage means behavioral detection plus the ability to isolate a host and roll back changes and the case for combining EDR and next-generation antivirus is that prevention absorbs the commodity volume so analysts spend attention on what prevention missed.
Two operational questions decide whether the product is livable across a client base. Ask what the agent does when it loses connectivity, because roaming laptops spend real time offline and a detection that only evaluates in the cloud is not protecting them. Ask what it costs in CPU on aging hardware, since much of any SMB fleet is past refresh age, and both answers arrive later as support tickets billed against your margin.
Rollback deserves its own scrutiny. Vendors demo it against a well-behaved ransomware sample. Ask what happens when encryption ran for forty minutes across a mapped drive, since that is the shape of the incident you will meet.
Email remains the highest-volume path into a small business, and the losses are not theoretical. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report counted more than $3 billion in business email compromise losses and 191,561 phishing complaints, the most reported crime type of the year. Coalition's claims data tells the same story from the insurance side, with business email compromise and funds transfer fraud together accounting for most of what gets filed.
The gap in many MSP stacks is that email security lives entirely outside the detection pipeline. A malicious inbox rule created after a successful phish is one of the clearest indicators of account takeover available, and it is invisible if mailbox audit events never reach your SIEM. Whatever product filters the mail, the audit telemetry behind it has to land where your detections can see it.
Collaboration tools carry the same exposure with less attention. Shared file links, guest access, and third-party app grants in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace are paths to client data no endpoint agent observes.
Identity is the perimeter now, and attackers treat it that way. The 2026 DBIR found that among ransomware victims with compromised credentials, half of those credentials were stolen within 95 days before the ransomware fired. That window is the most actionable number in the report, because it describes a detection opportunity that most stacks are not instrumented to catch.
Token theft, MFA fatigue, and malicious OAuth grants do not trip endpoint detections at all. A stolen session token produces a sign-in that looks legitimate from an attacker's device, and no amount of endpoint tooling on the victim's laptop will see it. If your stack cannot observe session anomalies and consent grants in Entra ID or Google Workspace, that blind spot covers most of the modern attack path.
Identity is also where automated response pays for itself fastest. Disabling an account and revoking active sessions is low-risk, reversible, and stops the majority of what identity detections catch, which makes it the first action worth authorizing without a phone call.
You cannot investigate what you never collected. A security information and event management layer turns scattered logs into an answer to "when did this start, and what else did they touch." For MSPs the deciding factors are ingest pricing that does not punish you for collecting Microsoft 365 audit logs, retention long enough for an insurance claim or a regulator, and detection content that arrives maintained rather than as a blank rules engine.
Retention length is the constraint that binds first. Forensic investigations and insurance claims routinely require ninety days of sign-in and audit history, and a thirty-day setting caps what can be reconstructed no matter how good the detection content is.
Pricing structure matters as much as capability. Per-gigabyte ingest models create a perverse incentive to collect less from the noisiest and most useful sources, and MSPs who have been burned by an overage bill tend to turn off collection rather than renegotiate. Understand the pricing before you design the collection strategy, because reversing that decision later means backfilling data you no longer have.
Tooling does not page anyone. Someone has to triage at 2 a.m., decide, and act. Whether you build that or buy it is the largest cost decision in an MSP security practice, and the math of building versus buying a SOC rarely favors building below a few hundred managed endpoints. Three shifts of qualified analysts is a seven-figure annual commitment before tooling, and the hiring market for those people does not favor a 25-person MSP.
Coverage hours are the wrong comparison. Ask what the analyst may do at 2 a.m. without waking you, because a service that can only notify has moved the alert, not the risk. That difference shows up as an hour of dwell time while a ticket sits in a queue nobody watches. Get the authorization matrix in writing during evaluation, covering account disablement, host isolation, and session revocation at minimum.
Also ask who you talk to. Named technical contacts who know your client base make a material difference during an incident, and a rotating pool of analysts reading from a runbook does not.
Compliance work used to sit outside the security stack, in spreadsheets kept by whoever had the patience. It moved inside, because the evidence regulators and carriers want is telemetry your security tools already hold. Running GRC for MSPs at scale across all clients means control mapping, assessments, policy documentation, and per-tenant reporting that refresh from live data instead of an annual scramble.
The operational test is whether evidence collection is continuous or event-driven. A control mapping that updates when configuration drifts tells you a client fell out of compliance in March. A spreadsheet tells you in December, when the audit is scheduled and the remediation window has closed.
Multi-framework support matters more than it looks. A client on HIPAA today acquires a defense subcontract next year, and re-doing the assessment from scratch because the tooling maps to one framework is unbillable work you will absorb.
Every MSP hits the same wall: incident volume grows with client count, analyst headcount does not. Automation keeps that ratio survivable, and the value sits in the boring repetitions of disabling an account, isolating a host, opening the ticket with context attached, and notifying the client contact with language you did not write at 3 a.m.
IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report put average savings from AI and automation in security operations near $2 million per breach, with only about a quarter of organizations using them. The same report found AI-enabled attacks in one in four malicious breaches, which is the other half of the argument. Attackers automated first.
Start with the actions that are reversible and end with the ones that are not. Account disablement and session revocation are easy to undo and stop most of what matters. Automated host isolation at a client with a single domain controller deserves a human in the loop, because the false positive costs more than the detection saved.
Every stack looks affordable in the spreadsheet where you priced it. The costs that determine your margin are far less visible.
Count the tools in your stack, then count the integrations between them that you maintain. Each connector is a credential that rotates, an API that changes, and a silent failure mode where data stops flowing and nobody notices until an investigation needs it.
Nobody schedules connector maintenance, so it happens as emergency work during the month it breaks. Worse, the failure is usually invisible: no alert fires when a log source stops reporting, so the gap often gets discovered too late.
If standing up a new client means seven deployments, seven tenant configurations, and seven sets of alert routing, your sales team is selling something your delivery team dreads. That friction becomes a slow quote, which becomes a lost deal.
Measure it properly. Time from signature to fully monitored is a number most MSPs have never calculated, and it is usually two to three times what the sales conversation implied. It also sets a ceiling on how fast you can grow, since onboarding capacity becomes the binding constraint for most MSPs adding security clients well before pipeline does.
Alert fatigue is the most expensive tax because it degrades the thing you sell. Four consoles produce four queues, none aware of the others, so analysts correlate by hand and get worse as volume grows. This is why security operations depends more on process than tools, and why a ninth product bought to close a coverage gap often makes detection worse.
The human cost compounds. Analysts who spend their shift clearing noise leave, and the ones who stay start closing alerts by pattern rather than by investigation. Neither shows up in a dashboard until the incident everyone missed.
Ask what leaving a vendor costs in year three, because that number is rarely discussed and always material. Historical telemetry that cannot be exported is gone. Detections tuned per client are rewritten. Every documented process references a console that no longer exists.
Every vendor relationship carries its own version of that bill, so eight products means eight of them, each payable at the moment you can least afford the disruption.
Best-of-breed wins on depth in a narrow lane. If you serve a vertical with an unusual requirement, a specialist product will beat any suite at that one thing, and that is worth paying for when the requirement is central to your book of business.
Platforms win on everything after the purchase: correlation across domains, one place to look, one deployment, one vendor relationship when something breaks at midnight, and a reporting layer that tells a client's owner what they bought. The tradeoff is accepting a strong-enough capability in some areas in exchange for coherence across all of them.
None of this pressure is new. Gartner found in 2022 that 75% of organizations were pursuing security vendor consolidation, with more than half naming analyst productivity and visibility as the driver, ahead of cost. MSPs feel that pressure multiplied by client count, because every integration and every console is duplicated across the entire book.
The test that cuts through the debate is retrospective. Take your three worst incidents from the last year and walk each one through the platform under evaluation. Where would detection have fired, what would the analyst have seen in one pane, and how many manual steps would remain? Vendors demo their “happy” path. Your clients’ actual environments and incidents are another story. If you are still deciding between categories, the comparison of SIEM, XDR, and MDR for MSPs is where to start.
Of course, a platform that covers eight areas at a mediocre level is going to be objectively worse than four good products. Those the gaps will be harder to see from inside a single console. Verify depth per module by asking which modules the vendor sells standalone.
Standardizing your stack is a multi-year commitment and deserves the requisite level of inquiry. Use the following to sniff around and kick the tires.
Ask to see a recent detection and the reasoning behind it. That separates a maintained detection library from a rules engine you will be expected to fill yourself, which is a staffing cost disguised as a product feature.
Follow it with a question about tuning. Ask how a false positive at one client gets suppressed without suppressing that detection everywhere, because the answer reveals whether the product accounts for thirty environments with thirty different baselines.
"24/7 monitoring" covers everything from a staffed console to an automated email. Ask who is awake, where they sit, and exactly what they can do without calling you, in writing.
Then ask about escalation. When the analyst cannot reach you overnight, what happens to the incident and who decides. That answer belongs in the contract, not in the first incident that tests it.
Retention length, export format, and what leaving costs you in year three are the questions vendors answer least readily and you will care about most. Ask whether retention is per tenant or pooled, and what an extension costs for the one client whose regulator requires more.
Ask where the data lives. Clients with data residency obligations will ask you, and "I will find out" is a poor answer in a sales cycle you are trying to win.
Ask how the product behaves across your whole book rather than one environment. Whether policy pushes across clients, whether per-client reports come out without hand assembly, whether a new technician can be scoped to certain tenants and no others, and whether billing data exports in a form your PSA can consume.
Request a reference from an MSP with a client count near yours. A product that works at five tenants and falls apart at forty is a common shape, and the only people who will tell you are already at forty.
Compliance decides whether your clients can win work at all, which makes it a filter on your revenue and a reason it belongs inside the stack rather than in a side engagement sold to three accounts.
The CMMC clause took effect in November 2025, putting Level 1 and Level 2 self-assessment obligations into contracts. In July 2026 the Department suspended Phase 2, the third-party assessment stage, and launched a reform review aimed at lowering the barrier for smaller contractors.
Despite the changes, the self-assessment and the underlying NIST SP 800-171 controls have remained. Clients in the defense industrial base still need evidence and, as such, CMMC guidance for MSPs serving DoD contractors holds. Treat the suspension as a change in assessment mechanics and say so to your clients before a competitor tells them the program is dead.
Outside defense, baseline expectations are converging. NIST's Cybersecurity Framework added a Govern function in version 2.0, putting accountability and oversight on equal footing with detection and response. That change matters to MSPs because governance is the part clients cannot outsource, and naming it explicitly makes the boundary of your responsibility easier to write into an agreement.
CISA's cross-sector cybersecurity performance goals reached version 2.0 in December 2025 and remain the best plain-language floor to hand a client who asks what "enough" looks like. They are voluntary, which makes them useful as a conversation rather than a threat, and they map cleanly onto the control areas above.
Insurance is what clients feel first. Coalition's 2026 Cyber Claims Report found initial ransom demands up 47% to an average above $1 million, 86% of victims refusing to pay, and business email compromise plus funds transfer fraud accounting for 58% of claims. Average claim severity fell 19%, which reflects better controls and faster response rather than gentler attackers.
Carriers price on controls they can verify, which is why cyber insurance is pushing MSPs toward formal GRC faster than any regulation has.
There is a liability dimension worth naming. Attestations on a client's application are made by the client, but the facts behind them come from you. An MSP who signs off on MFA coverage that turns out to be partial has created an exposure no service agreement fully absorbs, which is a reason to produce control evidence from the platform rather than from memory. The application is the opening. A carrier questionnaire answered truthfully is a security roadmap with a deadline attached, handed to a client already motivated to close the gaps in it.
Most MSPs arrive at this guide with a stack they inherited rather than designed. Replacing it is a project with real risk, because the window where you are running two things badly is the window an attacker gets.
Inventory what you own, what each tool costs, and which clients are on which version of your stack. Most MSPs find meaningful drift in that exercise alone, with older clients running configurations nobody has touched in two years.
Then map current controls to what the platform covers before you cancel anything. The gaps you find in that mapping are the argument for the project, and the overlaps are where the savings are. Do this on paper before a single migration ticket opens.
Migrate in waves, starting with the tools carrying the least operational dependency and the clients most tolerant of change. Your largest client is not the pilot, whatever the commercial logic says.
Sequence by capability rather than by client where you can. Moving all thirty clients to one access control product, then all thirty to one endpoint product, keeps your team working in one problem domain at a time and makes the runbook improve with repetition instead of resetting.
Run overlapping for one renewal cycle on anything protecting a top client, and track detection quality during the overlap rather than after. Gaps are cheaper to find while the old tool is still running.
Define parity before you start. Same detections firing, same telemetry arriving, same response times, measured over a defined period rather than judged by feel. A security assessment at the start and end of the migration gives you a defensible before-and-after, which is worth having when a client asks why their bill changed.
A platform is an input cost. Turning it into a service line takes deliberate design, and skipping that step is why the margin fails to appear where the spreadsheet said it would.
Clients cannot evaluate whether EDR at $6 and DNS filtering at $2 is a good deal, and itemizing invites them to cut lines. Price per protected user, in two or three named tiers, with capabilities described as outcomes rather than product names.
A baseline tier covers endpoint, access control, and identity monitoring. A managed tier adds 24/7 detection and response with defined authority to act. A governed tier adds assessments, policy documentation, and compliance reporting for clients carrying a framework obligation. Three tiers is enough, and a fourth usually exists to avoid a difficult conversation with one client.
Make compliance its own billable motion rather than a favor. An annual risk assessment, a quarterly control review, and a carrier-ready evidence package are deliverables with a price, and they sell easily because the client already feels the deadline.
For many MSPs the assessment is the entry point to the managed tier six months later. It surfaces gaps in language the client's own auditor or carrier already used, which means you are not the one arguing they need more security. Price the assessment at a level that survives being compared to a one-page checklist from a competitor, and deliver a document the client's board can read.
Security spend gets cut when nobody sees it working, so the quarterly business review is where retention is earned. Show blocked attempts, mean time to respond, patch and MFA coverage trends, and open risks the client has chosen not to fund, with dates.
That last item is both a sales tool and your documentation if the worst happens. A declined risk on record shifts the accountability for it, while an unraised one leaves it with you.
The margin math is unforgiving of complexity. If your cost per endpoint is six line items and your delivery cost is three analysts context-switching between consoles, your effective margin sits well below the one in your spreadsheet.
Track delivery hours per client per month as the real measure. Consolidation earns its place when those hours move out of tool maintenance and into billable work. An MSP that cuts four hours of monthly maintenance per client across thirty clients has recovered most of an FTE without hiring one.
The right platform depends on your client mix and how much response work you want to own. Evaluate on coverage across network, endpoint, identity, and cloud, on multi-tenant management, on whether response authority is included or sold separately, and on pricing at your client count. Run your last three real incidents through each candidate rather than trusting a demo.
At minimum: identity-aware network access control, endpoint detection and response with prevention, email and collaboration telemetry, centralized log collection with usable retention, 24/7 response staffing, identity threat monitoring for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, and a compliance layer that produces per-client evidence. The categories matter less than whether their data reaches a shared place where detections can correlate it.
Map your current controls to what the platform covers before canceling anything, then migrate in waves starting with the tools carrying the least operational dependency. Run overlapping for one renewal cycle on anything protecting a top client, and track detection quality during the overlap rather than after. Define what parity means before you start, because "it feels fine" is not an answer you can give a client.
Yes, and several vendors now build that way, but verify depth per module rather than accepting the list. A suite with a strong endpoint product and a token log-search feature is a different purchase from one where every module stands on its own. Ask which modules the vendor sells standalone, how many customers buy them that way, and whether the modules share an agent and a data store.
Per protected user, in tiers, with the security stack folded into the managed services agreement rather than sold as an add-on the client can decline. Most MSPs serving small business price the baseline tier near their existing per-seat management fee and roughly double it for a fully managed detection and response tier. Compliance prices separately, as assessments and recurring reviews.
No platform makes a client compliant on its own, because every framework requires documented policy, defined process, and human decisions no product can produce. A platform supplies the control coverage and the evidence, which is most of the effort. The rest is governance, and it is billable. NIST CSF 2.0 made that split explicit by adding a Govern function alongside the technical ones.
Measure delivery hours per client per month before and after, onboarding time for a new client, tickets closed without escalation, and mean time to respond. Those four move first and your team feels them. Revenue effects show up later as attach rate for the managed tier and as fewer clients leaving over price, since a consolidated stack is harder for a competitor to underquote credibly.
Inventory what you own, what each tool costs, and which clients are on which version of your stack. Most MSPs find meaningful drift in that exercise alone. Then fix the capability with the widest gap, usually identity monitoring or log retention, before touching anything that works. Sequencing by gap size rather than by preference gives you something defensible to show a client who asks why their environment changed.
Todyl consolidates SASE, endpoint security, SIEM, MXDR, security automation, and GRC into a single-agent, multi-tenant platform, with GRC support for CIS V8.1, CMMC, HIPAA, NIST CSF, and NIST SP 800-171 Rev 3, automated compliance mapping, out-of-the-box security assessments, consolidated policy documentation, and reporting across every client you manage. See the platform.
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