From seasoned cybersecurity business leader to Regional Director of the Nordics and Baltics with Logpoint. Niels Onat has had quite the carrier when it comes to the MSSP market. MSSPs have very specific wants and needs that all facilitate them in providing what is important to clients – value. So what is Niels bringing to Logpoint? What has his career taught him about the role of the MSSP and how does that fit with Logpoint? Matt Rhodes, Regional Director for MSSP sat down with him to ask all of the important questions.

You’ve had a substantial career in cybersecurity. Tell us, what did your journey look like in terms of gaining the experience you have within the MSSP market?

In my role as CEO for Ezenta, I led the transformation from a VAR to an MSSP. We had several service offerings, from technical maintenance of security solutions. Eg Check Point firewalls, where we made sure customers’ firewalls were running, updated, and optimized (looked at traffic, analyzing, reporting, and optimizing). To more sophisticated services such as MDR, where we build a detection and response service, that had the primary function of detecting suspicious behavior and responding to it within minutes. Furthermore, the service also helped the customer to have a proactive defence by using threat intel to explore and threat hunt in the customer environment, which was effective together with deceptive technologies such as honeyputs.

We saw that customers wanted more services and less advice on just buying hardware and software, that the market was furthermore getting more and more mature, and competition was fierce. Hence it was a natural step to provide customers with more value-added services on a partnership approach where the service could be developed in line with customer requests and in a model where the customer could get the SLA that was right for them.

The demand for these services overtook our revenue compared to the traditional resell of software and hardware in just a couple of years. In the beginning, the cost balanced the revenue, but as more customers came onboard the economies of scale were obvious

So, after years in cybersecurity, you’re now at Logpoint bringing with you a wealth of MSSP knowledge. Can you maybe list the main values you are seeing from MSSP’s?

– Direct access to the limited IT Security specialists

– Shorter detection cycle

– Rapid implementation – An easier way to implement threat detection and incident response capabilities quickly

– Detection and incident response

– Low cost and great value add – sharing cost, sharing value

– a solution that is operational cost which the customer can increase/decrease more rapidly as needed

Speed and value are of the essence. Niels, let’s get down to the important stuff, there’s a clear burning question to ask you… What attracted you to Logpoint?

I believe the Converged SIEM solution is both the heart and the brain in a modern security solution. Logpoint’s technology with both SIEM, SOAR, & UEBA in a cloud, or an on-prem version, had great reasoning to me.

I’m convinced we (the industry) need a European player in this area and not only rely on American vendors to fix the issues and keep our most sensitive data safe. Getting the opportunity to lead this solution in the home market (Nordics), and less mature Logpoint markets (Baltics), motivates me a lot.

We know what MSSPs value when it comes to the tools at their disposal. How do you think Logpoint can complement MSSPs in providing the best value to their customers?

Logpoint has several years of knowledge and experience that is structured in a way that can be used proactively for MSSP’s. Here’s how:

– We can help build and evolve a modern SOC or MDR solution.

– We know how to use threat intel for threat hunting.

– We know how to use our playbooks and how to build new ones for fast implementation.

– We know how to respond to alerts both with analyst intervention and fully automated in a SOAR context

In addition, we know how to market MSSP offerings to the market and we will support MSSPs with marketing and sales resources.

As cybersecurity continues to increase in complexity and cost, Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) perform a critical role in what is normally a daunting task for businesses and organizations when strengthening their security posture.

Niels Onat

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