Marc Roberts | Head of Network Solutions, Redcentric
A recent forecast predicted the managed services provider (MSP) market will reach $309.4 billion by 2025. This huge projected growth in the MSP model reflects large and small organisations seeking to outsource various IT services to third parties specialising in those services. Identity and access management (IAM) is a strong option for MSPs to add to their service portfolios in a world where businesses increasingly struggle to deal with the complex problem of providing secure access to users in a hybrid IT environment where users access services both on-premise and remotely.
At Redcentric, our partnership with Thales helps to deliver flexible and scalable remote access to organisations in critical industries such as healthcare and the public sector. Here are four key benefits to our business from partnering with Thales to deliver cloud-based access management and authentication via SafeNet Trusted Access.
Flexible Billing Model
An influx of uncertainty from the Covid-19 pandemic meant Redcentric faced billing challenges with a prepaid service model. Paying upfront for authentication services when customers were unsure of how many users they would need or for how long they’d need remote access would not be practical financially. However, with the flexible billing model provided by Thales, Redcentric benefited from consistent and easy to manage service costs.
The flexible pay-per-use billing model doesn’t only address cash flow obstacles; it also reduces operational overheads for MSPs. Companies like Redcentric can simply raise one monthly invoice to cover all their customers and their service usage within a given month. This replaces the need to cut purchase orders for individual customers and pay multiple invoices on behalf of those different customers.
Scalable Authentication
Redcentric’s remote access service had a stable and consistent user base for 15 years. However, the Covid pandemic inundated the business with both new and existing customers requiring remote access for large numbers of users. Redcentric faced an almost overnight need to scale remote access.
The scalable authentication capabilities provided by Thales meant Redcentric could securely increase its remote access platform’s capacity by 20x within the space of just a couple of weeks. Without the ability to scale authentication, Redcentric wouldn’t have been able to provide secure remote access, which would be disastrous for customers in healthcare and the public sector.
Full Range of Functionalities
Another benefit to any MSP using SafeNet Trusted Access is the availability of the full range of functionalities within the platform. In practice, this means an MSP gets total control over the range of services they can use within the platform, and, ultimately, monetise those services in alignment with their own business model. This extra flexibility for MSPs in terms of building out their service offerings can help to map out a strategic horizon for attracting and acquiring new customers.
As Thales continues to innovate and offer more capabilities within SafeNet Trusted Access, MSPs like Redcentric and their customers will benefit from a wider range of use cases. For example, Thales provides a diverse and expanding number of ways to authenticate users, which gives businesses extra options to choose authentication mechanisms that best balance security and usability for their particular risk profile.
Meets Other Pandemic-Induced Challenges
Quite apart from effortlessly scalable authentication to meet remote access demands, partnering with Thales helps MSPs and their customers address additional challenges induced by the global pandemic. As budgets have been cut, employees have been furloughed, and businesses have enacted survival plans, security gaps emerge when businesses provide access to more users without being able to secure that access comprehensively due to limitations in budget and skillsets.
The pay-per-use pricing model at Thales helps businesses retain a strong security posture for users when they really need it. This is particularly important in the context of seasonal fluctuations in user bases where, with other pricing models, businesses might pay for access management for 2,000 users when they only need 1,000 users most of the time.
Access the full case study here to learn more about the technical details, the solution, and the results that Thales and Redcentric achieved together in providing secure remote access to businesses during an unprecedented time in modern IT.