What is MSP?
Managed Service Provider
A company that remotely manages a customer's IT infrastructure and end-user systems, increasingly delivering SASE as a managed security service with multi-tenant platforms.
MSPs are the fastest-growing channel for SASE adoption, particularly for SMBs that lack the internal expertise to deploy and manage SASE platforms. The MSP model works because SASE's cloud-native architecture eliminates the hardware-per-customer model that made managed security expensive. One MSP engineer can manage 20–40 customer tenants from a single console.
The economics: MSPs typically purchase SASE licenses at 30–50% below list price through partner programs, then sell managed SASE services at a 2–3x markup. A $12/user/month license becomes a $25–35/user/month managed service that includes monitoring, policy management, incident response, and quarterly reviews. Margins improve with scale because the operational overhead per tenant decreases.
Key considerations for MSPs selecting a SASE platform: multi-tenant portal maturity, per-tenant billing granularity, hierarchical RBAC, policy templating, API completeness for automation, and the vendor's channel commitment (some vendors compete with their own MSPs on deals under 500 users).
A cloud-delivered architecture that converges SD-WAN and security services (SWG, CASB, ZTNA, FWaaS) into a single, globally distributed platform.
A software architecture where a single platform instance serves multiple independent customer organizations (tenants) with isolated data, policies, and configurations.
An access model that grants users connectivity to specific applications, not networks, based on identity and device posture, verified continuously per session.
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