How Identity Drives MSP Profitability: An Analyst’s Perspective

Forward by Gary Hall, VP, Global Ecosystem Strategic Partnerships

The security landscape for managed service providers has fundamentally shifted as identity has become the primary control surface. We are now in an era where AI-assisted social engineering and stolen credentials allows attackers to bypass traditional defenses by logging in rather than breaking in. This makes protecting the identity plane the single highest priority for SMB and midmarket customers, particularly as the rise of machine identities creates a new, ungoverned attack surface.

For current managed security providers, the primary challenge is the operational tax of vendor sprawl. Managing a fragmented stack of security tools drains engineering hours and hinders profitability. Cisco’s Secure MSP Center resolves this by providing a single, multi-tenant operating layer that allows you to consolidate telemetry and manage diverse tenants from one interface, directly improving your gross margin by reducing the…