SkyKick continues to bring new innovations to Security Manager to solve the biggest partner challenges in building and growing their security services. Less than 3 months post launch in October 2022, we’ve released 3 key updates to enhance the user interface, increase visibility within the main dashboard, and include automated reporting to help partners easily accelerate their security business. These 3 updates are based on feedback from our Partners and specifically solve these partner challenges:
- Getting their bearings straight on using secure scores as a lens through which they look at where their practice is, and where the opportunities are.
- They’re looking for what are the few things that deliver the most urgent and most useful impact on security and how they can resolve specific security issues.
- How to take the security insights into a customer conversation.
We will unpack these questions in the following chapters.
Update 1 – Expanded Visibility of Microsoft Secure Scores
Partners are saying they want to get their bearings very clear on where they are on security and this Microsoft secure score is typically a very good instrument through which they can get clear about where they are. The beauty of Secure Score in Security Manager is that every partner gets Secure Score, regardless of their customers’ licensing types. This clear and crisp view lets partners know where they are today security-wise.
But it’s not just a number, it’s really about understanding what that number means, how is it different across different customers, how is it different across different products that they have? It’s about the clarity of the picture that is built around the security score and that is the experience that we have created first and foremost.
Security is a journey, not a destination. Secure score over time shows you where your team has been tracking and making progress over time. The data-driven and factual insights show Secure Score results from security posture improvements.
Additionally, these rich dashboards identify strong security referenceable customers (Top 5%) and the customers that might need extra attention. Indeed, partners can turn Secure Scores into a business growth engine.
Update 2 – Specific Actions Listed to Increase Secure Scores per Customer
Once you get the perspective on where you are from Secure Score. Obviously, most partners want to get better at security, but the question is which customers are you going to focus on? Which security alerts are you going to focus on? Are there specific users that you need to focus on more?
And as you think about all of these things, how do you do less and create more result – focus and precision. That is what this whole second experience is about. How do you do more with less energy? How to improve your secure score more. How to focus on the few customers or the few users that will have the most bang for the buck in your security actions.
And underneath that of course something that hasn’t changed from SkyKick is how we have built in a lot of automation that can help partners take care of these problems.
A typical mainstream partner could have dozens of customers, and hundreds, if not thousands of users under management with millions of security signals. And we have taken all of that and turned it into actional insights. Pinpointing what are the burning issues right now. It’s literally like finding a needle in a haystack. Think about how much time this could save you in running your M365 security practice. And how much would this be worth to you?
On top of that, The new filterable “Products Licensed” view gives the ability to identify which licensing plans and help partners deliver the best security for their customers. Think about your NCE renewals that are coming in the next 2-4 months – understanding what product licensing customers have, this is important when pre-NCE customers come up for renewal.
Update 3 – Automated Reports Show M365 Security Insights to Your Customers
This is a brand new experience Security Manager brings to partners in this 1.1 release. When we talk to partners, we realized that partners are already doing many of these M365 security services. It’s like preaching to the choir. Partners are asking us to get to the next level on this. They want to take this conversation to the customer. Growth in the Security business can’t be achieved in a vacuum – its needs data-driven conversations with customers.
And that’s exactly what we have built here. Security Manager now provides deeper Reporting to drive specific Customer Conversations and/or efficiently measure & improve security operations. We created this whole set of experiences where it makes it easier for the partner to engage the customer, show them in a data-driven way where that customer is on security, to be able to build the case for where they want to go with that customer, using maybe other customers that have gone in a deeper relationship.
Partners can leverage the customer-specific reporting to demonstrate in their sales journey to Customer X, how Customer Y’s secure scores increased as they made the right level of security commitment with this partner. What better way to convince customers to make the right investments in security today?
Strategically, this new value-packed release shows that we understand our Partners’ Security journey, that we appreciate how this journey can feel unwieldy and daunting, and how we are helping them break down the problem methodically to conquer this monster. To quote Rocky Balboa, “One step at a time. One punch at a time. One round at a time.”
Over the month of February, we will be putting out deep technical blog series of these three big security value props and take a deeper look at each one.