Importance of Support In Offering Profitability
NextWave free Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) make substantial investments in building out their practices. MSSPs don’t just deliver products and features, they deliver business outcomes to their customers that enable them to drive consumption of the underlying technology. To deliver these outcomes profitably, they must create a standard offer that has a defined cost. There are three key elements in maximizing their underlying service costing structure: technology, program incentives and product support.
During the last year, the NextWave MSSP Path has been transformed, enhancing an MSSPs’ profitability when they make investments across the services lifecycle, related to offer development. This includes various benefits:
- Access to the Members Only Service Creation Library
- MSSP-Specific Product Specialization Enablement Points
- MSSP Proficiency Enablement Paths
- NextWave Incentives and Partner Perks
The NextWave MSSP Path requirements and benefits provide partners with defined financial rewards for making the required investments. However, the partner can also affect their managed services profitability by leveraging specific functions and offerings:
- Automation and machine learning functionality of Palo Alto Networks products in their technology stack
- Palo Alto Networks Global Customer Success support offerings
- Completing the MSSP Path’s Services Implementation Plan
The Service Implementation Plan will serve as a foundational document for the MSSP and Palo Alto Networks cross-functional teams to engage more closely and drive friction out of the sales, operational and post-sales support engagement. Fundamentally, one of the goals of the plan is to reduce the mean time to resolution of support tickets by providing details on the MSSPs’ offer functionality and integrations. Expanded knowledge by the cross-functional teams will facilitate faster engagement and troubleshooting, resulting in more timely resolutions of tickets with the MSSP, helping to manage the MSSPs cost of support.
Additionally, MSSPs can look to reduce their cost of service by ensuring that their SOC and managed service offering is optimized with Palo Alto Networks products:
- SOC Services – Palo Alto Networks can help MSSPs fine tune their SOC through Security Assessments to identify gaps in their operations and provide clear recommendations to increase automation and improve response times.
- Design Services – The Palo Alto Networks High-Level and Targeted Design Services are based on best practices and the MSSPs requirements, which provide designs that help MSSPs execute their Palo Alto Networks products in a meaningful way.
MSSPs can reduce support costs by optimizing their support structure to account for their customer SLAs, thereby accelerating mean time to resolution of support tickets. They can do this by leveraging existing enterprise offers, based on the required response times for critical issues, such as Platinum Support or Premium Success, along with Focused Services-Elite. These combinations provide proactive management and ensure that customer needs are met efficiently.
- Platinum Support – Platinum Support is offered by Palo Alto Networks to provide partners with direct access to a dedicated team of senior engineers who are trained to quickly understand and resolve unique challenges. This support program offers numerous benefits, including expedited response times with a 15-minute response time for critical issues. The team also provides assisted first responses to help orient investigations and troubleshoot incidents. Additionally, advanced log and indicator of compromise (IOC) analysis is conducted, followed by next-step security recommendations and referrals to qualified incident response partners.
- Premium Success – Premium and Standard Success plans help partners get the most out of their investment. The Premium Success team provides guidance for easy deployment and adoption of product capabilities, ongoing support and assistance to ensure desired security outcomes and best practices are followed. With access to 24/7 technical support, disruptions can be minimized, and premium response times of 1 hour on critical issues can accelerate issue resolution. Additionally, industry-leading security experts can help partners achieve maximum product adoption aligned with their strategic goals.
- Focused Services - Elite – Elite helps partners stay continuously ahead of threats with a Support Account Manager at Palo Alto Networks, who is a dedicated resource and well-versed in your business objectives and strategic use cases.They prioritize and manage technical support activities to ensure the partner’s support needs are met. The partner will have access to 24/7 designated engineers, who possess intimate knowledge of your security environment, providing in-depth resolutions for complex technical challenges. Root cause analysis is available for critical issues. Coordinated access to resources ensures fast resolution and turnaround times. For on-site troubleshooting beyond remote assistance, a field engineer can be dispatched. You'll also receive personalized alerts and notifications based on the severity of threats relevant to your environment. Twice a year, your Support Account Manager and designated engineer will provide personalized recommendations for software releases.
Improve Your Profitability
To learn more about how to build, maintain and support a profitable managed service offering, become a member and visit the NextWave Partner Portal, or contact us at mssp@paloaltonetworks.com.