Better Margins, Better Security: Why the right cybersecurity partner matters

* Recorded live on January 25, 2024. Please note since this recording, Covalence has been renamed to Field Effect MDR.

Discover how the right cybersecurity partner can accelerate business growth by delivering the better security your clients need and the better margins you want.

In this exclusive session, Head of Strategic and Channel Sales, Marty Landry, will share exactly what to look for in a partner and how a holistic approach reduces complexity, streamlines operations, and lowers your operational costs.

Watch this recording to learn more about how Field Effect can help you position your business as the go-to cybersecurity service your clients need.

Better margins, better security: Why the right cybersecurity partner matters

If you're an MSP or solution provider trying to build a profitable security practice, you're likely wrestling with the same core tensions: clients want protection they can afford, you need margins that make delivery sustainable, and the threat landscape keeps getting more complex. In this session, Marty Landry (Head of Channel at Field Effect) breaks down what's broken about the current approach and what a better one looks like.

The real challenges MSPs are facing

Most partners are trying to solve three things for their clients: reasonable pricing, reliable protection, and the ability to offload the burden of managing security entirely. That last one is why clients come to an MSP in the first place. Cybersecurity professionals are expensive, in high demand, and hard to retain, and clients have their own businesses to run.

The challenge hasn't gotten easier on the partner side, either. The threat landscape is evolving fast. Attackers have moved downstream, targeting SMBs precisely because they tend to have weaker defenses. Distributed, hybrid workforces have expanded the attack surface dramatically. And everyone is working with limited resources against adversaries who seem to have endless ones.

Why complex security stacks are breaking the model

The response to these growing threats has largely been to add more tools. The result? Expensive, complicated security stacks that still leave gaps, because most of those tools were never designed to work together.

The real cost shows up in your team's time. When your techs are spending their days sifting through hundreds of cryptic, noisy alerts (most of which are false positives), that's your most expensive resource being burned on the least valuable work. It also requires a high level of expertise to operate effectively. You can hand someone the best tool in the world and it's useless if it takes a specialist to run it. Cybersecurity experts can cost $150K or more, they're scarce, and they're hard to keep.

The industry hasn't helped. A lot of the biggest names in cybersecurity rely on fear-based marketing to push new solutions. The threats are real, but fear isn't a strategy, and it's not the basis for a trusted advisor relationship with your clients.

A different approach: visibility and risk management

The better framing, both for your own operations and for conversations with clients, is risk management through visibility.

A threat surface is anywhere an attacker can get into an organization: endpoints, network, cloud services. No single area is less important than another, and if you're only protecting one of them, you have blind spots. The more visibility you have across the entire surface, the more proactively you can operate. A reactive security posture means constant chaos; a proactive one means catching problems before they become incidents.

This is where a holistic MDR platform changes the equation. Rather than cobbling together disparate tools that speak different languages and require integration work to function, a solution built from the ground up to cover cloud, network, and endpoint together gives you a single, coherent view of what's happening across your clients' environments.

Field Effect MDR was built exactly this way. The company's roots are in the intelligence community. Founder Matt Holland was a lead researcher for one of the world's top intelligence agencies, training cybersecurity professionals and studying how traditional security tools fail. That perspective shaped a platform built from scratch, not assembled through acquisition, where everything speaks the same language and gaps between tools don't exist by design.

What it looks like in practice

The platform is built around what Field Effect calls AROs: Actions, Recommendations, and Observations.

• Actions are critical issues requiring immediate attention. The platform can take automated responses on your behalf (locking an M365 account, isolating an endpoint) if you've configured it to do so.
• Recommendations are non-critical gaps that need to be addressed: unpatched systems, exposed vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild. Think of it like a dentist flagging a small cavity before it becomes a root canal.
• Observations are informational items (a new server appearing on a network, use of remote administration tools) that may or may not require action.

Rather than thousands of raw alerts, your techs see plain-English instructions with context, compliance mapping, and clear mitigation steps. When something is unclear, a live team is a click away.

The holistic approach matters most when you're looking at correlated signals. A user logging in from an unusual ISP might be nothing. That same user logging in from a new city, on a new device, from an ISP associated with malicious activity is a different story entirely. Having visibility across cloud, network, and endpoint simultaneously is what lets you connect those dots.

Proving value to clients

One of the hardest parts of managed security is demonstrating value when nothing bad has happened. Reporting closes that gap.

Weekly internal reports show your techs how many raw security events were processed and filtered down to a handful of actionable items, making your team's efficiency visible. Monthly client-facing reports show everything being monitored, alerts handled, and ARO score trends over time. Detailed board-level reports explain the threat surface in plain English and document what was done to reduce risk.

That paper trail is how you move from "what are we paying for?" to a defensible, data-backed conversation about risk management.

Services that grow your revenue

Beyond the core MDR platform, there are proactive and reactive services that create additional billable opportunities.

Proactive services include cyber maturity assessments, IR preparedness exercises, phishing simulations, and penetration testing. These tend to surface gaps that translate directly into additional project work for partners.

On the reactive side, incident response services are available for clients both with and without existing MDR coverage. Field Effect uses its own platform for IR work, which demonstrates the level of visibility the solution provides and tends to drive high conversion to ongoing monitoring.

What to look for in a cybersecurity partner

A few principles worth applying to any vendor evaluation:

• People, process, and technology, not just tech. When things go wrong, you need someone you can actually call.
• Owned technology. If your partner controls their own stack, they can respond to your feedback and give you predictable pricing.
• Willingness to get in the trenches. Look for a partner that will co-sell with you, provide technical demos, and help you market the offering, not just hand you a portal login.
• Integration with your workflow. Bidirectional integrations with ConnectWise, Autotask, and similar tools keep your techs working where they already work.
• Simplicity at scale. L1 techs should be able to manage the platform effectively. Freeing up senior staff for higher-value work is where the real labor cost savings come from.

Pricing and getting started

Field Effect prices per user, with everything included: network monitoring, cloud monitoring, endpoint security, active response features, DNS firewall, and more. No modular add-ons, no SKU maze. Volume pricing is available for MSPs managing multiple clients.

The recommended path for new partners mirrors the path for onboarding a client: a technical demo, a cybersecurity snapshot to assess current gaps, and a free trial to get hands on the platform. Field Effect can assist with all three steps for your end customers as well.

Q&A

How do you price?

Per user, and everything you saw in the demo is included. There are no additional charges for active response, network monitoring, or cloud monitoring. The per-user model is intentional: it encourages deploying the solution everywhere, including on the machines that are often most at risk. Volume pricing models are also available for MSPs who want to purchase in bulk and distribute across their client base.

How do you move clients up from basic cybersecurity to something like this?

The key is educating them on what a threat surface actually is, without leaning on fear. Legacy tools only protect one piece of the picture. To properly protect a client from today's threats, you need holistic visibility across cloud, network, and endpoint. A line that resonates with many partners: "Without an MDR service, I don't have the visibility I require to properly protect you from today's threats."

It also helps to speak their language. If you're selling to a dental office, talk about cyber hygiene the same way they talk about regular cleanings. Small problems left unaddressed become expensive ones. The cost of a breach almost always outweighs the cost of prevention.

What about Mac OS and Apple device support?

Field Effect supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, which puts it ahead of many vendors. Mac parity for features like DNS and device management integrations is on the roadmap. Partners with specific needs around MDM and Apple-based device management are encouraged to raise those directly with their account manager for a defined timeline.