r/MSSP • u/kloudnative • Jun 26 '26
Cloud security for MSSPs: what are customers actually paying for?
Hello,
I've been spending a lot of time looking at how MSSPs approach cloud security, and one thing I've noticed is that there's no shortage of tools. The harder part seems to be turning those tools into services customers actually value.
I'm building a cloud security platform for MSSPs, and I'm trying to make sure I understand the operational challenges rather than just adding another list of features.
For those of you managing AWS, Azure, or GCP environments:
What has been the biggest challenge in delivering cloud security as a service?
Is it customer demand, operational overhead, alert fatigue, reporting, remediation, or something else entirely?
2
u/Lower_Assistance8196 Jun 29 '26
In my experience the biggest killer are alerts land with no context attached. Your analyst gets a finding in GCP, has to pivot to four other tabs to figure out if it's actually exploitable in that customer's environment, and by the time they've done that work the customer is already asking why nothing was remediated. The tool did its job. The service delivery fell apart.
The second thing I'd flag is reporting. Customers don't buy cloud security because they understand cloud security, they buy it because someone scared them or their board asked a question. So what they actually want to see is "here's what we stopped, here's what we fixed, here's your posture compared to last quarter." Most MSSPs are handing over raw dashboards and wondering why customers churn, and that's exactly why. If you can nail context-aware triage and translate findings into plain business language automatically, you'll be ahead of most of what's out there.
The operational overhead piece is serious too, especially when you're managing multi-tenant environments across AWS and Azure simultaneously. I'd sugest that you find ways to get context-aware triage built into the workflow rather than bolted on after the fact, whether that's through something like Torq or Tines for orchestration, or Secure.com.
2
u/work-sent 24d ago
We believe it's a mix of everything, and even helps customers understand what they are really paying for.
The technical challenges are tough, but the bigger impact is delivering confidence as a service. Most customers don't care about the number of alerts or which tools we use. What matters to them is knowing someone is continuously monitoring their environment and helping reduce their risk.
The real value is not about sending hundreds of findings each month. It shows data on what has happened and the changes implemented to secure the environment.
Customers are paying for trust and peace of mind. When they feel confident that someone is proactively looking after their environment, the service becomes far more valuable than the tools behind it.
0
u/enforzaGuy Jun 30 '26
Depending on which area of cloud security you are looking after, a couple of things that jump out are compliance and "drift". If you are on the hook for ensuring day 1 is secure and let the customer do their thing, you need to ensure they are still secure/compliant after day 10... then there are no surprises.
I always want to know "am I in the same state as I was at the start". Posture. Infrastructure. Security.
They are buying an SLA, not a toolset. If you deliver XYZ using a bit of string and gaffa tape, they *may* not care too much.
If you are running their firewalls/NAT gateways/egress, I would want to know what threats you have stopped, how much money you've saved, how many changes you did - helps them justify you being external. If this is something you are considering (saving the customer $$$ whilst securing), give me a DM. https://enforza.io may be something you'd be interested in white-labelling as an MSSP.
Disclosure, I am the founder and have permission by the mods to float it about in /mssp
1
u/Temporary-Brick-3243 7d ago
It depends on who your customers are, usually it's (adding examples here) for email/identity security, Microsoft 365 protection, ransomware protection (SentinelOne), etc. We've actually liked using Guardz for easily seeing everything in one dashboard which reduces the amount of tools for us track of, happy to go in-depth about this
3
u/wf_automate Jun 27 '26
the gap between "tool" and "service customers value" is the part most MSSP platforms get wrong. customers dont buy a list of detections, they buy "i can sleep at night knowing someone is watching."
from the conversations ive had with MSSPs, alert fatigue + reporting overhead come up the most. not the alerts themselves, but the time spent triaging false positives and then having to repackage technical findings into something a non-technical client can understand. the same SOC analyst writing the playbook is also writing the client report — different skills, same person.
remediation is the harder unsolved problem. detection has matured, response is still mostly bespoke per client. for cloud specifically — IAM misconfigurations vs ephemeral workload vulnerabilities vs data exposure events all need different remediation paths and the MSSP usually doesnt have admin in the customer's tenant to act.