Increasing your MRR with security awareness training

An important part of running your MSP business is increasing your monthly recurring revenue (MRR). This allows you to expand your business further, gaining new clients and maintaining the customers you want to have on your client list. 

What can MSPs do to increase their MRR to achieve this? This can be achieved by lowering your running costs but also by creating new opportunities to add on services that are relevant and give you a competitive edge. Cybersecurity is one of the biggest growth areas for MSPs and it makes sense to look at security awareness training as a smart way to generate recurring revenue. 

The challenges

How to overcome the many challenges faced when keeping clients secure while weighing how to improve your MRR? 

Ongoing security issues

An MSP’s primary objective is to offer security stacks for their customers to ensure that they are safe from the various dangers they encounter on a daily basis. An MSP can lose MRR if they don’t adequately safeguard their customers, resulting in security breaches. This can be detrimental to the MSP if a client loses faith in them because of it. 

Increasing support tickets

An MSP can also lose money by receiving numerous support requests from their clients. Spending a large portion of your day handling support calls or addressing potential security threats/incidents can consume time that would otherwise be spent improving your security stack or attracting new clients. Reducing incident rates and shifting the majority of work from reactive to proactive phases can decrease employee stress, increase profit margins, and build customer loyalty by reducing critical events. 

Competitive market

MSPs who want to stand out from the considerable competition in the managed services sector need to offer their clients services that others cannot, positioning them at the forefront of their industry. With the shift in focus to providing more specialized security expertise, MSPs can generate an increase in their average revenue by providing security awareness training.

Improve MRR with security awareness training

Maintaining existing MRR and improving a company's MRR while alleviating the roadblocks described previously is simple with the help of a powerful Security Awareness Training (SAT) tool. SAT can be used by an MSP to educate its customers' users, so they are not unprepared to face the threats they are facing.

Improved security stack

The end-users in any organization are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Cybercriminals use social engineering tactics that prey on greed, trust, and human curiosity to gain unauthorized access to data and systems via individuals within organizations:

Just look at the statistics on emails being used as a weapon of choice for cybercriminals:

• More than 90% of malware is delivered via email
• Nearly 50% of malicious email attachments are Office docs 
• 300,000 new pieces of malware are created every day to target people and organizations
• Phishing attacks are responsible for more than 80% of reported security incidents
• About 90% of data breaches occur due to phishing. 

Over 70% of security professionals who experienced a breach in their organization agree better security awareness training would have minimized or even prevented those breaches. Yet only 60% of MSPs offer security awareness training. Brining SAT into your managed services offering can boost your MRR from clients who are looking to protect their business and employees. 

Reduce security support tickets

Using the right SAT can help to reduce your clients’ security events, which means fewer support tickets being logged. Fewer security events allow your MSP to build strong relationships with more clients and manage their technology and security more effectively. 

Be a leader

Cyber breaches are expensive, with a single data breach causing countless hours spent on remediation and recovery for your MSP, and the damage done to the trust your clients place in you. There are other MSPs out there who will take on clients that aren’t happy with your services or are worried about the level of security they are getting. 

Get in front of the competition by offering security training focusing on educating the first line of defense for your clients - their employees. Offering a continuous security awareness program to your clients doesn’t just improve their cybersecurity posture, it protects your business and creates a recurring monthly revenue stream. 

What security awareness training tool to use?

There are many different types of SATs, and most businesses and MSPs don’t have the time to deploy new tools or technologies. It's important to choose a SAT that is simple to use for your clients, comprehensive and covers relevant information security issues and removes all barriers to use.

Important considerations when looking at SAT tools to offer your clients:

• Training should be for all levels within an organization, including business management and C-suite. Cyber threats such as phishing emails target lack of knowledge rather than where a person sits in a business. 
• Courses should be short, engaging, and regularly updated, to avoid boredom fatigue and lack of compliance.
• Delivery of SAT courses should be customizable, to allow MSPs to tailor based on client needs.
• Administrative tracking of employees’ progress should be available 
• Reporting capabilities to document risk level and track compliance
• Regular phishing simulations and campaigns to put users to the test in a real-world scenario

Boost your MRR with the best SAT tool

Security awareness training is not a ‘one-and-done’ situation, it requires MSPs to maintain a close partnership with their clients by creating an added value service and has the potential to further enhance your security stack offerings.

Empower your MSP business with comprehensive cybersecurity solutions and security awareness training offered as part of ThreatAdvice’s Breach Prevention Platform. Contact ThreatAdvice today to discover how you can increase your MRR with comprehensive security awareness training.