Grow your business with Office 365 Advanced Security and Compliance

  • Article

by Natee Pretikul, Senior Partner Marketing Manager, Office 365 Security and Compliance

Cybersecurity is a complex problem, from the volume of attacks to increasingly sophisticated hackers. Organizations don’t want to be in the headlines, as the impact to business is significant. Over the last year, many partners have started to develop and offer security-related services with Office 365 Advanced Security and Compliance. They’re addressing customers’ cybersecurity pain points, and helping enterprise clients of all sizes become more secure.

Our quantitative research shows that partners with a security practice expect to see their security business double by 2019 (MDC, Office 365 Solution Selling, April 2017). That’s a huge increase in business. You could see a similar impact to your bottom line with Office 365 Advanced Security and Compliance workloads.

With increasing security needs from customers, many partners that haven’t offered security services may wonder how to get started. Here are my suggestions.

Increase your knowledge with the latest resources

Lack of security talent in the market is a well-known issue. When you offer security-related services, your team should have great capabilities to support clients and understand product usage scenarios.

Microsoft is here to help. Check out the latest Office 365 Advanced Security and Compliance training videos at Partner University (access requires signing in as a Microsoft partner), with topics such as:

  • Fundamentals of building an Office 365 security practice
  • Perform security assessments with Office 365 Secure Score
  • How partners can help secure a customer’s Office 365 Tenant

At the end of the training, take the Technical Skills Assessment for Office 365 Security Partner Training to test what you’ve learned.

Learn from other partners’ success

The easiest way to get started is to learn from what other partners are doing. Many partners use a security assessment to raise security awareness, following up with a proof-of-concept (especially with Advanced Threat Protection), consulting and recommendations on next steps, driving deployment, and providing on-going services.

Staying secured is an ever-changing journey, which translates into on-going customer demand. Managed services and project-based services make up more than half of cloud IT security revenue (MDC, Office 365 Solution Selling, April 2017). See examples of this trend in these case studies:

  • Learn how Wortell uses Secure Score to drive deeper security conversations.
  • Discover how Olive & Goose has built a successful business targeting the Office 365 security and compliance space.
  • Find out how Peters & Associates uses Microsoft security and compliance solutions as a key component in the transformation of its IT consulting practice.
  • Learn how DynTek uses Advanced eDiscovery and other Office 365 capabilities to drive business.
  • Explore how Planet Technologies helps government customers adopt Advanced Threat Protection for price/performance advantage.

Drive security assessment workshops with customers

Most customers are reactive when it comes to security measurement, and you can help customers take a more proactive approach, beginning with a security assessment. As you can see in the examples above, other partners have found that conducting workshops is an excellent starting point. To help you get started quickly, we developed the Office 365 Secure Score Assessment IPKit for Microsoft partners.

The IPKit provides you with eight documents that help you effectively leverage Office 365 Secure Score to assess a customer’s Office 365 tenant, then provide recommendations to help address their security concerns.

Join the Office 365 Security Partner Yammer group and click Files to access and download the IPKit.

Stay informed