An endpoint is a remote computing device that communicates back and forth with a network to which it is connected. Originally in the business world, an endpoint used to mean a specific location, and, more often than not, that location would be the desktop that an employee used for work wherever their job site was. Thanks to the recent surge in work from home (WFH) and remote work brought on by the pandemic, endpoints are no longer a stationary destination and more in flux than ever before, which has brought about major challenges in the IT world.

What created the most problems for the IT industry in this shift to WFH is just how quickly the transition has happened. What many thought was going to take a matter of decades has, for the most part, been accomplished within the past two years. This rapid digital transformation of numerous industries, while creating an abundance of challenges, created none more than in relation to security, specifically cyber security.

Overall, since the start of the pandemic, which many equate to as the beginning of this digital shift, cybercrime is up 600 percent. Roughly 30,000 websites were hacked daily in 2021, with 64 percent of all companies experiencing some form of cyberattack during the last calendar year. In March of 2021 alone, more than 20 million records were tampered with, which averaged out to 677,270 tampered records per day. On top of this, the cost of a single data breach increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million in 2021, the highest in the past 17 years, with six trillion being spent globally to fix breaches in 2021.

To combat this rise of cyber threats and cyberattacks, more businesses are turning to IT organizations and managed service providers (MSPs) to help boost their security infrastructure. Many IT organizations and MSPs are taking swift action to address these security worries, and when it comes to boosting cyber security, many of these organizations are starting with the cloud.

“Cloud computing technology is extremely beneficial for every company, small to large, offering faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale,” said Ryan Walsh, Chief Operating Officer, Pax8, a Colorado-based company that offers a cloud marketplace promising to simplify the way organizations buy, sell, and manage cloud solutions. “Digitizing the IT ecosystem and adding on new cloud computing systems can be a challenge for some businesses, especially small and medium enterprises that lack technical resources, which makes tightening cloud security even more challenging for these companies, which is where MSPs come into play.”

To ease this process of cloud security boosting, both MSPs and the companies that need the aid have begun to leverage cloud marketplace platforms, such as Pax8. These are a type of application marketplace, synonymous with Software as a Service (SaaS) marketplace, where customers can go to an online storefront to find, purchase, and manage cloud-based applications, while MSPs can promote their services to those who need it most.

“By leveraging a cloud marketplace platform, MSPs can easily quote, order, bill, and provision cloud products in one place, with one monthly bill, while taking their cloud operation offerings to the next level,” Walsh said. “This includes cyber security software up to and including endpoints. Unified cloud management platforms make it far easier and more predictable for MSPs to find the best tools and applications which they can sell to their customer base.”

Originally, when businesses wanted to shop for cloud-based applications or digital solutions, they had to contact a distributor for each company they were considering, but now can take advantage of vendor-agnostic marketplaces and experience the benefits of cloud computing, along with robust and capable cybersecurity.

Zac Paulson, CEO at TrueIT, one of the thousands of MSPs Pax8 supports, said, “Pax8 helped us become more operationally efficient. Now, we’re able to put our efforts where they belong — providing a great experience for our clients.”

Walsh said that in a multi-cloud world, with more and more cloud-native applications and services online, “cyber threats are becoming more complex and fast-moving. As a result, being able to secure all the elements in a business cloud has become nearly impossible without visibility and control, especially as the edge of the network becomes significantly more distributed and dispersed.”

On the vendor side, Brandon Andrews, VP Worldwide MSSP & Alliances at SentinelOne, explained the advantage of being part of the Pax8 marketplace this way:

“Pax8 has acted as a strategic partner with us as we expand our GTM strategy. Being integrated into the Pax8 marketplace has empowered us to grow and scale our business better than anyone in the industry.”

The demand for increasingly effective security solutions to protect network endpoints, devices, and applications is growing parallel to the MSP and MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider) industries, especially as small to medium-sized businesses grow, empowered to compete with large enterprises given access to enterprise-quality services.

According to Mordor Intelligence, the global managed services market was valued at USD $215 billion in 2021. It is expected to reach USD $296 billion by 2024, registering a CAGR of 11%, during the forecast period (2021-2024).

“Enterprises and government organizations across the world are moving from test environments to place more of their work-critical workloads and compute instances into the cloud,” the report stated.

Further, owing to the rapidly increasing adoption of IoT, cloud, and big data analytics across multiple organizations as a major part of their digital transformation strategy, the burden on the data centers is also increasing. This is leading to the growth of the market.”

Mordor also noted that the managed services for cloud, IoT platforms, containers, DevOps, and Big Data, are expected to hold tremendous potentials for managed service providers during the forecast period, with an emphasis on cyber security.

“It is estimated that successful deployment of managed services will help in reducing IT cost by 25-45% and increase operational efficiency by 45-65%,” calling out the economic advantages for businesses to move to an MSP model. “

Additionally, Mordor says, “organizations have actively amended their strategies to get the maximum benefit from managed services over the past few years. For instance, in the past years, organizations have been increasingly focusing on reducing costs by cutting down the number of suppliers and reducing the payment size. As a result, the demand for bundled services has gained immense traction in the market over discrete offerings.”