1Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients Secure, Connect, and Manage SMBs Like Never Before to Delight Clients and Drive Growth

2

03 Introduction

06 MSPs—the New Cybersecurity Heroes

07 Find Your Superpowers

08 Step 1: Seek a management architecture tailored for MSPs

09 Step 2: Automate, integrate, and delegate

11 Step 3: Centralize monitoring and visibility with dashboards

12 Step 4: Ensure consistent threat exposure management

13 Step 5: Assess the platform’s security effectiveness

14 Step 6: Verify the security platforms' product integrity

15 Step 7: Ensure ongoing training to minimize knowledge gaps

16 Step 8: Plan for growth

04 Cyber Threats are Risky Business for SMBs

17 How Check Point Helps

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

1 United States Small Business Statistics, Sellers Commerce 2 EU SMBs: A Powerful Force to be Harnessed for Growth, Eurasia Review 3 The Business Times

INTRODUCTION Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) businesses are economic powerhouses. They account for 99% of all U.S. businesses1, 99% of businesses in the EU2, and 97% of Asia- Pacific enterprises3. They employ up to 70% of workforces and contribute 40% to 60% of the gross domestic product in their countries.

They are also just as likely as large enterprises to be attacked by cyber threats and have far less resilience for recovery. As a Managed Services Provider (MSP), your SMB customers believe cybersecurity is important, and they trust you to deliver protection. They also tend to underestimate the complexity of ensuring comprehensive, seamless defenses.

In this eBook, we'll outline the biggest cyber risks SMBs face, the challenges you face in securing their assets, and eight ways you can deliver the best SMB security solutions while actually reducing your own overhead. Let's get started.

4Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Although many small business owners think that cyber attacks primarily focus on large enterprises, that's not true. SMBs are a major target for cyber attackers. Although many SMBs don't report cyber attacks, data from 20244 suggests that one in three SMBs experienced a cyber attack in the previous year. Other estimates place that number even higher.

Leading Cyber Threats Attackers use the same tactics against businesses of all sizes. Why? Because they work.

CYBER THREATS ARE RISKY BUSINESS FOR SMBS

4 New research: SMB cyberattacks are frequent and costly, Microsoft Security

Phishing

Ransomware

Business email compromise

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks

Malware and viruses

Insider threats

IoT vulnerabilities

5Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

SMBs are Unwilling Vectors Many SMBs are vendors for large enterprises. Attackers increasingly target smaller manufacturing and supply chain partners as a pathway to infiltrating their large enterprise customers. Third-party data breaches are one reason larger organizations now frequently require SMB vendors to provide proof of cyber insurance as part of their compliance checklists6.

5 New research: SMB cyberattacks are frequent and costly, Microsoft Security 6 Preparing for 2025: The SMB Cybersecurity Gap, Forbes

Same Threats, Greater Impact An attack that causes limited damage to a large enterprise can put an SMB out of business. Research5 shows that the average cost of a single attack on an SMB ranges from $254,445 to $7 million. Total cost includes investigation and recovery costs, fines, downtime, reputation costs, and missed opportunities. Few small companies can survive a financial blow of this size.

Mind the Gaps Although SMBs are allocating more of their budgets to cybersecurity than they did a few years ago, they still need enterprise-scale security solutions to fight enterprise-level threats. Security has to become core to operations, but most SMBs face four critical challenges to achieving that goal:

1. Limited cyber security resources. Security solutions capable of standing up to highly skilled adversaries are expensive, and SMBs also have fewer financing options than larger enterprises.

2. Lack of internal staff. Security talent is hard to find, even if the SMB can dedicate a full-time person.

3. Lack of security expertise. SMBs must focus the majority of resources on their core business—they can't also be cyber experts.

4. Rapid change. The pandemic forced many SMBs to quickly implement remote work and cloud solutions, often with security as an afterthought. As new technologies like AI emerge, SMBs struggle to keep pace with their security defenses.

6Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

The good news is that SMBs are increasingly turning to you for their cybersecurity needs, presenting exciting opportunities for growth. Behind the scenes however, more responsibilities require more staff and more hours in the day. Labor costs represent 60-70% of your cost of goods, yet experienced talent is costly and even more difficult to find. In addition, 39% of a team's time is spent on manual tasks7. This leaves little margin for innovation or strategic projects.

Demonstrating the growing demand for managed IT services, in the U.S., the MSP industry is growing at an annual rate of 10.82% and expected to reach $116 billion by 20308. The European managed services market is growing at 8.5% and projected to reach $196.61 billion by 20269.

Under the Cape: Top Pain Points The reality is that high labor costs limit the size of your team, while manual tasks hamper their productivity. Now throw in constant change and multiply everything:

• Multi-account management: Your teams must manage multiple needs for multiple accounts, including provisioning, licensing, billing, and communication.

• Multi-vendor management: You now operate and maintain your own—as well as customers'—multi-vendor environments. Your team has to learn and manage multiple products from multiple vendors, be familiar with multiple interfaces, manage multiple configurations, respond to alerting, and implement adds and changes.

• Multiple solution patching: Keeping solutions patched is critical to security. Staying on top of patching in-product vulnerabilities for multiple customer gateways and solutions is risky and time-consuming.

• Ensuring security coverage: Because SMBs are vulnerable to cyber attack across a broad range of threat vectors (e.g. phishing, zero days) and use cases (cloud, email, network etc.), you're responsible for ensuring adequate levels of protection.

• Closing the knowledge gap: Your team has to continually keep up with the latest product updates, vulnerabilities, threat landscape and attacker tactics and techniques.

• Maintaining customer satisfaction: As the MSP market is growing, competition is everywhere. Delivering on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is table stakes. Adding value through specialized services, like cybersecurity, and maintaining customer relationships will be key to growth.

MSPs - THE NEW CYBERSECURITY HEROES

Demand for managed IT services is growing at an approximate rate of 11% in the US and 9% in Europe.

7 The Future of MSPs in 2025: Predictions and Trends, Forbes 8 US Managed Services Industry Size, Share Analysis & Report (2025-2030), Mordor Intelligence 9 The Growth of MSPs in Europe, IR

7Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Your challenge is clear: deliver enterprise-class security to SMB customers while slashing your operational overhead and empowering your team. But you have allies. With a security-first mindset, you can put data, analytics, AI, and automation superpowers at your team's fingertips to deliver superhero customer service and eliminate labor-intensive tasks. The key is finding these capabilities integrated in a single solution purpose-designed for MSP teams. Let these eight steps guide you toward success.

FIND YOUR SUPERPOWERS

8Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

STEP 1 | Centralize monitoring and visibility with dashboards

Single cloud-based management can cover multiple products and services. One consistent environment reduces the time spent moving between different consoles and dashboards while shortening your team's learning curve.

Having single, cloud-based management gives you centralized access to massive amounts of data. Dashboards are useful tools for quickly surfacing issues and accessing more detail. A good management tool should provide a centralized dashboard as well as multiple topic-specific, lower-level dashboards. It should be possible to double-click any issue found on a dashboard to get more information and eventually solve the problem.

Figure 1 - Save time with a comprehensive view across all customers and gateways, and drill down into more detail anywhere.

9Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

STEP 2 | Seek a management architecture tailored for MSPs

Multi-tier, multi-tenant architecture streamlines downstream administration. Multi-tenant architecture allows you to separate each customer's data, provide them with limited access to their tenant, and offer individualized report, while tracking all customers from one place. Multi- tier management enables your team to delegate simple tasks to your SMB customers, such as changing their Wi-Fi network’s password or adding a VPN user. Now you can spot security issues across all customers, track license status, break down security events across products, and drill down to individual account risks.

Template-based configuration simplifies everything. Configuration templates slash customer provisioning time, simplifying gateway implementation. Predefined policy templates for access and security settings enable your team to securely bring customers on board quickly. Look for an architecture with the ability to tailor templates based on specific customer requirements.

Global Plan 1 Global Plan 2

Figure 2- Customizable configuration templates save time and increase accuracy

Simplify the multi-everything challenge with a security architecture designed specifically to handle it all. The solution architecture should provide:

10Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Gain proactive monitoring and alerts. Your team can't sit and watch dashboards all day. A good management solution provides a range of notification types—from security to operational alerts—and be able to send them across the channels your team prefers, such as email, MS Teams, Slack, or others. Avoid alert fatigue when notifications are real, prioritized, not repetitive, and actionable. Notifications also can automatically open tickets in systems like ServiceNow or Jira when an issue arises.

Delegate tasks to customers. Take a load off your team by delegating simple tasks to your SMB customers—things like resetting Wi-Fi passwords, allowing remote user access, or applying policy to a new application.

Automate cross-product workflows for critical monitoring, alerting, and response. Look for a platform that automates threat detection and response workflows across tools and multiple vendors' products. For example, is an infected PC detected in one network? Immediately ensure that all gateways in that network automatically sever communications with it. Automatic cross-product workflows can be applied to anything: endpoints, IoT devices, mobile devices, and more.

Figure 3 – Automate cross-product threat mitigation

Figure 4 - Leverage proactive alerts for faster resolution

Figure 5 - Delegate simple tasks to customers to free your team for more important tasks

Proactive Alerts

Corner Shop PCs

Change Wi-Fi password

Add VPN user

Add admin

Edit security policy

More options

VPN is Down

STEP 3 | Automate, integrate, and delegate

11Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Figure 7- Leverage generative AI assistants to increase productivity

Integrate products and tools for seamless security enforcement across multiple enforcement points. You should be able to use the endpoint protection, ticketing, and alerting systems you already have and integrate them effortlessly with powerful security defenses. API-based integrations with popular security products and common IT services let you orchestrate cross-product workflows, including received alerts from other security vendors and pushing new threat intelligence back to them as well.

Zero-touch provisioning. Large MSPs often prefer not to send an IT technician to the customer’s premises to install a new gateway. To that end, zero-touch provisioning can be used, which assigns a configuration to the gateway ahead of installation. The gateway is shipped to the end customer, who connects it to the power socket and internet. The gateway then automatically gets the configuration file from the cloud, so the customer can get up and running in minutes.

Leverage generative AI assistants to revolutionize team productivity. With knowledge of your specific environment, GenAI assistants can help admins perform rapid policy updates, fine-tune security controls, and answer questions. Security analysts can be guided through incident response, threat hunting, and executing playbooks. Team members should be able to ask natural questions and receive contextual, complete answers.

Figure 6 – Seek API-based integrations with your current products and tools

12Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

A centralized management platform should give you the ability to apply and enforce policy across the complete range of enforcement points—such as networks, endpoints, clouds, and SaaS applications.

• Rely on consistent threat intelligence to prevent known and never-seen-before malware, phishing schemes, and zero-day threats across enforcement points including network firewalls, cloud firewalls, applications, endpoints, mobile, email, and IoT devices.

• Go beyond just known Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) with powerful threat prevention capabilities, including sandboxing (threat emulation) and content disarm and reconstruction capabilities (threat extraction) to find threats hiding in PDFs, spreadsheets, email attachments, and other downloaded files. Real-time online form scanning protects against threats from just-published phishing websites.

• Ensured advanced intrusion prevention: To identify suspicious behavior patterns in apps, systems, and servers, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capabilities are embedded into firewalls, enabling the identification of known IPS signatures to virtually patch against known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Advanced IPSs may also block unknown attacks based on suspicious behavior patterns.

• Automate threat exposure management across vendors: The very latest threat prevention and threat exposure management capabilities enable IoC enforcement AND virtually patching for known vulnerabilities across an organization’s multi-vendor

environment. Threat exposure management platforms have emerged that leverage an organization’s current security arsenal to identify gaps, prioritize them according to level of potential impact and automate their remediation, whether it’s through virtual patching or IoC enforcement. This type of preemptive exposure management maximizes an organization's security posture, using its current tools, without business disruption.

Figure 8 - How Check Point automates cross-vendor virtual patching

STEP 4 | Ensure consistent threat exposure management

Map Exposed Asset against available Enforcement Points and

Compensating Controls

1

Vulnerable Server identifiedVulnerability

Management

Safely Activate Protection across multi vendor products

in a fast and reliable manner

2

AWS WAF

...and 60

more

Multi-Vendor Virtual Patching

Simple, safe mitigation of exposure across 70+ Security Vendors

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13Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

When SMBs turn to you for effective security services, the platform you choose must deliver. Compare various platforms' security effectiveness across common threats.

Compare detection and prevention rates for malware and phishing attacks. The most critical factor is identifying and preventing never- before-seen malware and phishing. For malware, identifying new strains is most critical within the first 24 hours of its circulation in the wild—when no anti-virus software has the new malware strain’s signature, requiring behavior-based analysis to determine if it is malicious or benign.

Another major factor to keeping customers safe is a firewall’s ability to block known exploits and vulnerabilities (KEVs). While most KEVs are not actively used in the wild, assessing a firewall’s ability to block those that are active in the wild is critical to preventing unauthorized entry points into customers’ networks, per CISA’s KEV catalog.

Compare detection and catch rates for phishing and malware

Assess the platform’s block rate of known exploits

2025 Security Benchmark Report Prevention rate within 24 hours of new variant

Figure 9 - Malware catch rate for new strains within first 24 hours in the wild among leading firewall vendors

62.7%

67.1%

87.7%

90.9%

99.9%

Source: Miercom Enterprise and Hybrid Mesh Firewall 2025 Q1

STEP 5 | Assess the platform’s security effectiveness

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14Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Figure 10 - : Number of in-product CVEs in leading firewalls

STEP 6 | Verify the security platforms' product integrity

Higher Product Integrity Fewer in-product CVEs Vendor-specific CVEs Found in the KEV Catalog

“CISA strongly recommends all organizations review and monitor the KEV

catalog and prioritize remediation of the listed vulnerabilities to reduce the likelihood

of compromise by known threat actors."

Source: CISA KEV Catalogue. As of January 2025

Platforms containing their own security vulnerabilities introduce unnecessary risk. Assess and verify vendors' product integrity against the CISA’s KEV catalog of known exploited product vulnerabilities. The fewer in-product CVEs, the higher the platform's integrity.

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15Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Threats never stand still and your team's knowledge can't either. Look for a vendor that can help keep your team's skills and awareness levels aligned with the threat landscape and product evolution.

STEP 7 | Ensure ongoing training to minimize knowledge gaps

Train teams on the latest threat actor Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) and improve their skills for mitigating them.

Look for a comprehensive range of training courses, certifications, and resources, such as those found at Check Point Infinity Global Services.

16Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

According to Analysys Mason, 25% of SMB customers switched IT service providers10 over the past 12 months, mostly due to lack of strategy and vision. By proactively solving more than your SMB customers’ immediate needs, you’ll become the strategic partner they’re looking for. This can take the form of providing broader security services, which may span network security, email security, endpoint security, mobile security, etc.

This partnership may also take the form of offering additional managed services (even if procured from an external vendor) such as ongoing detection and response services that monitor for network or security issues, emergency incident response services and periodic penetration testing.

Figure 11

STEP 8 | Plan for Growth

10 Source: Analysys Mason - SMB Cyber-Security Challenges and Solutions

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17Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Through the Check Point Infinity Portal, you gain the centralized, intuitive management needed to effectively manage SMB security while reducing operational overhead. The Infinity Portal provides you with:

Multi-tenant, multi-tier architecture: Ensuring scalability together with customer data isolation and the ability to delegate administrative tasks to SMB customers.

Pay-as-you-go licensing: OPEX-based pricing allows you to pay only for what you use to accommodate seasonality and a changing customer base.

Centralized visibility across accounts: Dedicated dashboards offer a consolidated multi-account view of security posture, network health and administrative data

Security policy and configuration templates: Customers can be quickly onboarded using predefined configuration templates for new security gateways. Predefined, customizable security polices save time.

Proactive management alerts: Infinity Playblocks allow you to proactively manage SMB customers, with alerts available via SMS text messages, Microsoft Teams, email, Slack, Jira and more.

HOW CHECK POINT HELPS

11 The Future of MSPs in 2025: Predictions and Trends, Forbes

MSPs who embrace AI, automation, and cybersecurity expertise are best positioned to capitalize on the growth in SMBs looking for expert service providers. By focusing on strategic partnerships or specialized niches, they can become true strategic partners to support their clients' growth and success11.

Check Point Software Technologies offers comprehensive cybersecurity solutions to governments and enterprises alike, aiming to prevent threats such as malware, ransomware, and phishing. These solutions span network security, secure access service edge (SASE), email security, endpoint security, managed endpoint protection and response, and cloud security.

18Eight Steps to MSP Excellence: Become a Superhero for SMB Clients

Check Point offers a robust suite of solutions covering every aspect of SMB security. With Check Point’s MSP program, you're well-equipped to secure customers' networks and users, whether they work on- or off-premises. Through the Infinity Portal you can offer:

Network security: Quantum Spark appliances are tailored for MSP-managed clients and support Wi-Fi, 5G wireless, SD-WAN and IoT security.

Secure access service edge (SASE) security: Harmony SASE delivers two times faster internet security with full-mesh secure access.

Email security: Harmony Email & Collaboration prevents phishing, data loss and malware, while protecting SaaS and collaboration suites.

Endpoint security: Harmony Endpoint is a complete endpoint security solution with an advanced endpoint protection platform (EPP), endpoint detection and response (EDR), and extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities.

Managed detection and response (MDR): Infinity MDR delivers security operations as a service with a prevention-first approach.

Cloud security: CloudGuard prevents threats and prioritizes risks in the cloud across your applications, network, and workloads.

For more information on Check Point and its MSP and SMB solutions, visit: • checkpoint.com/partners/mssp-program/

• https://www.checkpoint.com/quantum/next-generation- firewall/small-business-firewall/infinity-spark/

• https://www.checkpoint.com/quantum/next-generation- firewall/small-business-firewall/

• https://www.checkpoint.com/harmony/sase/

• https://www.checkpoint.com/harmony/email-security/

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is a leading provider of cyber security solutions to governments and corporate enterprises globally. Its solutions protect customers from cyber-attacks with an industry leading catch rate of malware, ransomware and other types of attacks. Check Point offers a multilevel security architecture that defends enterprises’ cloud, network and mobile device held information, plus the most comprehensive and intuitive one point of control security management system. Check Point protects over 100,000 organizations of all sizes.

To learn more about us, visit: www.checkpoint.com

ABOUT Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

United States Corporate Headquarters Redwood City

100 Oracle Parkway, Suite 800 Redwood City, CA 94065l

Tel: 1-800-429-4391

Contact us International Corporate Headquarters Tel Aviv

5 Shlomo Kaplan Street Tel Aviv 6789159, Israel

Tel: ‪+972-73-226-4555

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