Microsoft 365 security best practices case study: Peters & Associates
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Microsoft security solutions provide a competitive advantage
Security is a top concern for nearly every business, but many lack the in-house expertise and resources to handle today’s threats. These customers are receptive to partners who can assess vulnerabilities and deploy a broad range of security solutions, especially solutions that provide a demonstrable and immediate return on investment.
In the Chicago area, Peters & Associates is using Microsoft security solutions as a key component in the transformation of its IT consulting practice. As a long-time Microsoft partner with multiple Gold and Silver competencies, they’re positioning themselves as leaders in the security space, and showing both existing and prospective customers how Office 365 Enterprise E5 can help them better identify and address security vulnerabilities.
Thought leadership drives growth
Recently, Peters & Associates has focused on developing content, hosting events, and creating a social media presence to reinforce its leadership position. These efforts are all tied to specific topics that leverage their expertise.
For example, as more companies become victims of ransomware, Peters & Associates has published a series of blog posts that provide advice on everything from whether to pay ransom demands to proactively opening a Bitcoin account to get a three-day lead in case customers decide to pay the ransom. Of course, the key message is to take the necessary steps to ramp up security and prevent attacks.
The goal of Peters & Associates' content strategy is to open conversations that ultimately lead to a security assessment.
Security assessments are the launching point
“Everything always starts with an assessment,” explains Bruce Ward, Vice President of Business Strategy. “It’s a truism around our organization that you pretty much can’t do anything until you know something about the client, and you have assessed their vulnerabilities.”
Office 365 Secure Score is an important part of this process. “When Microsoft first released Secure Score, we were right in the middle of a manual assessment for a large banking client. Secure Score made the process easier and more graphical,” said Ward.
“Now it’s part of our security assessment and it’s an element we use to judge things that have moved from ground to cloud.” Security assessments have helped them land several new customer accounts, and opened other opportunities that are currently on the table.
Extending Customer Engagements
One of the ways Peters & Associates is addressing customer demand is through what Ward calls “bundling on steroids,” using security solutions that can be packaged as new services to establish and extend Customer Engagements.
Bundling security tools dovetails perfectly with Peters & Associates' desire to shift from project-based services to managed services that improve their competitive positioning and deliver higher margins. “Now we can say to customers, for a set fee per-user per-month, your desktop is covered. That includes the products, plus all our services to install, monitor 24/7, and handle incidents,” Ward explained.
Ward highlights Microsoft’s Advanced Threat protection (ATP) as one of the key launch points for bundling opportunities. “ATP is selling like hot cakes, it’s number one on our list,” Ward said. “We call it Managed ATP, because ultimately what we do is bundle our pricing so we give them onboarding assistance, licensing assistance, and user training support. Bundling our services around ATP is something smart to do.”