How this Canadian MSP enhanced its Microsoft 365 offering with Office Protect

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Authen-TIC is a Quebec company that provides managed IT services to small and medium-sized businesses. Their goal? Offer tailor-made and personalized all-in-one Zen-TIC solutions to their customers. And what could be more zen than knowing that your data is safe?

Authen-TIC takes care of it all: Alert management, productivity, communication and configuration. However, this rich offering requires that their interventions be targeted and consistent, particularly when it comes to cybersecurity.

“Office Protect really secures Authen-TIC's offering. The alternative to Office Protect Core is to pay someone to take care of security in-house. And that gets expensive really fast.”

Martin Beaudet, co-founder and CEO, explains how Sherweb's Office Protect has allowed the company to enhance their offering and ensure long-term customer loyalty. Office Protect is a professional service that secures Microsoft 365 at the tenant level. This proprietary solution by Sherweb provides continuous security monitoring, detection, response, and management of Microsoft 365. Office Protect actively monitors for threats, investigates alerts, eliminates false positives, and provides guided response and remediation.

“On a day-to-day basis, the main goal of any MSP is really to reduce the number of service requests. This is why the automation offered with Office Protect is key. We look at what pops up most often, we detect recurring problems and we see if we can solve them through automation.”

Security best practices

One of the major challenges for Authen-TIC before adopting Office Protect was to master and implement good security practices.

“Office Protect allows us to learn best practices. We know that if they add a new feature, it’s because it’s important. This way, we don’t need to always question ourselves. Sometimes Office Protect even sends us tips based on market recommendations. This is all the more important considering that 70% of cyberattacks target Microsoft products given their global popularity (Kaspersky Lab, 2020 ¹).”

Selling Office Protect as a Sherweb partner

“Sherweb offers us all the support we might need. This aspect is very important to us. When we have questions about new products, trends, the market, product positioning, Sherweb offers us content that is easy to understand and can be reused for our own customers.”

From the start of their partnership with Sherweb in 2015, Authen-TIC quickly adopted Office Protect; and the number of their customers who benefit from it, estimated at 50% today, continues to grow.

“By the end of the year, all our Microsoft 365 customers will have Office Protect. For our new customers, this is a given – the solution is offered by default in our packages. For current customers, there is migration work to be done. We're on it!”

Significant added value

There is value in a relationship of trust with your customers. Authen-TIC knows this and strives to cultivate this strength on a daily basis. According to Martin, the guarantee of an efficient security service is a considerable selling point.

“The benefit of Office Protect is really the added value. The features of Office Protect fit directly into the description of our solution, ZEN-TIC. This makes it easier to present our products, guarantees the customer a quality product and gives us peace of mind.”

Upon deployment, through the initial vulnerability assessment, the MSP provider can demonstrate to their customer that it has their security at heart. This creates a relationship of trust from the very beginning. The vendor can then focus its energy on value-added projects rather than checking hundreds of alerts and threats, saving time, money and resources!

Avoiding IT disasters

“Activate the solution before it's too late!” says Martin. One of his clients, with about twenty employees, was recently the victim of an extortion attempt of about $100,000. An unusual connection from Nigeria that went under the radar redirected mailboxes externally, impersonated the company by purchasing the company's “domainname.co,” and gained access to the account of a member of the finance team.

“For this customer, Office Protect could have made all the difference. With multi-factor authentication and alerts in place, this kind of situation simply does not happen. It could have been avoided. After this incident, Office Protect was integrated quickly, without any questions by the customer about the billing!”

Horror stories are rare at Authen-TIC, precisely because Office Protect has been in place for a long time. Martin says many incidents have been successfully prevented. For example, Office Protect recently sounded the alarm when keyword redirect rules (such as “Desjardins”) slipped into a business owner's inbox. “We were able to intervene very quickly before something happened. We were alerted, which allowed us to act in time.”

Office Protect, a solution that continues to evolve

“The product continues to improve over the years. I saw that Sherweb added a Teams option a few weeks ago. It’s very interesting and deserves to be known.”

Martin's advice for other MSPs? Talk to their trusted partners to see how they can enhance their offering and grow their value.

¹ “Over 70% of the total complaints received by Kaspersky were related to applications within Microsoft Office, with browsers trailing behind in a distant second.“

https://www.statista.com/chart/20431/most-commonly-exploited-applications-worldwide/