Name: Get Started with Sophos MSP Connect Flex
Uploaded: 2025-04-24T05:49:10.056Z
Duration: 1 h 3 min 4 s
Description: Get Started with Sophos MSP Connect Flex

Transcript for "Get Started with Sophos MSP Connect Flex": Hi everyone, thanks for joining and welcome to our webinar on get started with Sophos MSP Connect Flex. In today's session we're going to hear from Alvin Chiu, our MSP Senior Channel Account Manager for Sophos APJ. He will take you through the MSP Connect Flex program. This presentation is being recorded and will be made available after the session. All attendees will be on mute for the whole duration. However, please feel free to post questions via the questions panel on the right hand side of your screen, and we will answer them during and at the end as part of a live q and a. So to kick off the session, we welcome Alvin. Thank you for joining the session today. My name's Alvin, and I help look after the Sophos MSP program here in the APJ region. Today, we'll be exploring this program, talk about how this program can work for you and your customers, as well as go through a live demo of the dashboards and price list. The Sophos MSP Connect Flex program allows you to utilize one security vendor from one management dashboard on one flexible program. In the session, we'll be addressing these different layers. First on the list here is lower vendor management expenses. The reason why we talk about this is because you may have a variety of different vendors for different solutions as part of your security stack. Things like the endpoint, the firewall, the wireless, the email, the mobile encryption, z t n a, and user awareness training. But by having it consolidated through Sophos, not only does it save your team time, but also training and also resources in terms of administrative items needing to manage the multiple different portals and vendors that you may have for the different layers. By having it through Sophos on this MSP program, it consolidates it all and managed through Sophos Central which we'll be exploring later on in today's session. Some of the benefits of becoming a Sophos MSP flex partner involves there's no purchase orders required because all the products are fully licensed, compliant, and are ready for consumption. And what that means is if you need an extra license or two, if you wanna do a deployment on the weekend, you won't need to reach out to your respective distributor to make an order or a purchase order and do a co term, mid term upgrade, and whatnot. All the licenses are readily for you to consume and deploy for your customers. Number two is cross sell. Since it is consumption based licensing, it makes it much easier for you and your team to be able to cross sell. And as I mentioned just a moment ago, true up and makes it easier to maximize your monthly recurring revenue, which is abbreviated here as MRR. Number three is customer retention. Customer retention is higher on this MSP program as opposed to one, two, or three year quotes because you'll be having regular engagements with your customers and cadence calls because it'll be a monthly billing arrangement that you have between you and your customer. The fourth item on the list is license usage. Because it is pure consumption based billing devices that are switched off for more than thirty days are actually not counted and this allows you to be able to scale up and down for your customers based off their actual usage for them. The fifth item is there is no advertised MSRP because the MSP flex program is designed around you wrapping your services to the offerings. What this means is you may have a certain set of skills, time, SLA, help desk, backup solutions, and maybe you might be the person running to their office helping them fix their printer for all we know. But the key thing is we don't dictate how much you have to sell it at. We do have a respective cost, and we will touch on that during the later part of today's demo session around the price list. But how much you wanna charge your customers, it's purely up to you and your arrangement between your customers. As we move on to this end to end protection from a single vendor, what this means is it allows you to have a variety of Sophos solutions all managed and offered through this Sophos MSP program. And what we've got here is that image of Sophos Central and the range of Sophos solutions available, but we've actually scattered them into different categories here. On the left hand side you will see the device subscription, server protections, cloud optics device reporting, and then on the right hand side we have things like the endpoint security, mobile advanced, device encryption, central email advanced, and fish threat. The reason why we have them in different colors with little letters around the screen is the D's, the S's, the C's, the D's, and the U's. These represent the different categories that they are in. And the reason why this is important is because Sophos on the MSP program actually aggregates a total usage that you have on each of these respective categories on the MSP program, and then it will actually help you with achieving different price bands along the way as well. And to help illustrate this, let's move on to the examples in the next slide. As you can see here, we have four customers, customer a, b, c, and d. Each customer would have a respective usage that might be on this MSP flex program with you. Instead of seeing each customer individually, we actually see you as an MSP consuming the aggregate, which would be actually 1,400 user licenses, 45 server licenses, 30 devices, and two blocks. And what this means is due to the aggregate licensing model, it means that the more licenses that you consume the per unit per month typically goes down for each of the respective categories. Now if you're at 1,400 user licenses you would be at the 1,000 to four thousand nine ninety nine user licenses. If you've got 45 servers, that would be at the 25 to 99 server licenses. If you've got 30 devices, that would be in the 25 to 99 devices and virtual appliances. And if you've got two blocks of central file reporting, it would be two blocks. That is a fixed price but every other item there on the screen is based off the aggregate and the further up that you go the per unit per month goes down. Typically some of these bands from one band to the next one up is about 15 points So you can imagine as you scale up and also having that sort of ramp up between you and your customers and cross sell opportunities where you are able to have that growing MRR for you and your organization there. Now the reason why we talk about this cybersecurity challenge is because we all know cybersecurity is important. We understand that it is top priority for IT leaders and organizations in every size from 10 employees to a million employees, and it is viewed as a mission critical board level priority. Now today, cybersecurity is about a hundred billion dollar market growing at about 10% per year, one of the largest and fastest growing segments in all of technology. Understand? It's very hard. And as there are more attacks and they become more sophisticated, coming faster and faster and harder, there are more tools, and those tools are also becoming a little bit more complex and difficult to manage. And security teams like yourselves are drowning in multiple siloed consoles and pages and pages of alerts. The cybersecurity challenge is not going to be sold by products alone. Even at advanced products with lots of AI and automation, cybersecurity is a contact sport that requires a seamless combination of advanced products and threat intelligence managed by seasoned experts working at the very best. If this wasn't all difficult enough, there is an acute shortage of cybersecurity talent. There are about three and a half million unfilled cybersecurity positions. Well, Biden, over 750,000 of them, in The US. That's a challenging lineup. If you are a huge company like JPMorgan, you might be up to this challenge. They may be spending over a billion a year on security, and they have over a thousand dedicated security professionals. But the vast majority of the organizations in the world, over 30,000,000, don't look anything like a JPMorgan. Unfortunately, they face exactly the same kind of threats. They're understaffed, they're severe budget pressured, and they are struggling to even manage tools that they have today. In short, they are utterly overwhelmed and in many ways exhausted. And as a result, today, vast majority of organizations around the world are poorly protected, and that's kind of scary. But we do have some good news. In the last few years, we've made enormous advances in key technologies that can fundamentally alter the playing field. In particular cloud computing, AI automation, and intelligence sharing. We can now do something at scale we've never been able to do before and that is to deliver cyber security as a service. As mentioned, cyber security as a service. This allows for an instant SOC, a 24 by seven threat detection response with expert led threat hunting, full scale incident response capabilities, and superior cybersecurity outcomes. The SOC. It can either be managed by you or by us. What we've got here is the ability to be able to collect variety of data to for our team to be able to contextualize it and then correlate it. Now on the right hand side here, we've got couple of investigation and response options. The top one is to do with the managed detection response services where there are 24 by seven Sophos MDR experts that are actively hunting, investigating, and eliminating attackers on your behalf. Or alternatively this is where if you were to operate this yourselves which would be through the XDR Sophos solution where you'll be able to manage it through a single platform, investigate it, report it, and manage it accordingly to be able to collaborate as such. Now the reason why this is important is because this is where it gives you the flexibility to be able to offer different types of solutions for different customers' needs throughout their cybersecurity journey. Now let's have a look at zero trust network access. With what's happened in the world in the last few years and the shift to remote work, remote workers are no longer implicitly trusted. They and their device have to earn their trust constantly. Another fundamental difference is that ZTNA only connects the user to specific application or system, not the whole network. So in this example here, you can see this remote user can access an application in AWS and another on the corporate network, but nothing else. By doing this, it reduces the overall risk on exposure for that user because they won't be using and accessing things that they shouldn't be accessing at the end of the day. And by reducing this, it also helps your customer's cyber security posture and compliance requirements they may have. Now as we move over to this Sophos Central, Sophos Central is where you'll be managing your customers' licenses, their deployments, their configuration, their alerts, their firewalls. There are different portals for each of respective areas. The partner dashboard is your level of access that you'll have for all your customers view. Then you'll have an admin tenancy for each of your respective customers where they'll have their own endpoint, mobile server, wireless encryption, email configuration, deployment. And each of the customers' tendencies, if required, you can also set up a self-service portal which would be useful for things like email quarantine, encryption key recovery, BYD of mobile devices, and potentially backup inbox as well. The way that this particular relationship breaks down is you on the left hand side is having access to the partner dashboard. Each customer would have customer A, B, C would have their own respective central admin account, and it's also up to you if you would be setting up self-service portals for some of the users in each of those customer environments. But it is really up to you as to where you wanna draw the line. If you're going to be fully managing this customer from your partner dashboard, you do not necessarily need to provide access to your customer to their respective tendencies. However, if you're one of your customers, let's say customer b, would like to view or manage some parts of that tenancy of theirs, you can provide role based administration control, and they'll have specific access that you can set for them as well. Now heading over to the partner dashboard, we'll touch on this very briefly, but we'll also be going into a live demo of this very shortly as well. But the MSP license management is something that you'll be able to see and manage through your central partner dashboard. This is a view of the managed customer usage. This is where you'll be seeing all your respective customers, be it termed or be it monthly. And all of their totals will be showing up here on the top there. Again, we'll be going into a little bit deeper once we head into the live demo as well. On your partner dashboard in the customer section, if you were to select a trial or term customer, it would show you something like this with their usage, their limits, their expiry dates. On the MSP Flex program, for a tenant that are using MSP Flex licenses, there are no limits. There is no expiration date. And that goes back to one of my earlier comments on the slide, which was to do with MSP Flex's consumption based licensing model, where you simply would have the licenses readily available for you to consume, be it scale up or scale it down. There is an expiry date, so you don't have to worry about your team needing to do renewals when that time comes. And you also if your team needs to add additional licenses, you don't need to go and get a purchase order or a quote and whatnot because the licenses are readily available for you to deploy as you deem fit and consume accordingly. Some of these icons here are mainly to highlight some of the differences between the MSP and the termed and trial side of things. But, again, we'll touch on that when we get into the live demonstration as well. When you're switched on for the MSP flex program, you'll be able to create monthly central accounts straight from your partner dashboard. Now for those of you on the call today and you're on the your partner dashboard and you don't see this button, you may need to complete a few items to to get yourself switched on in terms of the training or part of the application process. Reach out to our team if you're not too sure where you're at, and we'll be able to have a check as to what's needed to get this switched on. When you create a monthly account, it will ask you for a few details about your customer. These details are not something that we'll be using to contact them. If anything, it's something that you and your team might be utilizing to contact. It might be their GM, might be the CEO, might be the owner, it might be the IT person there. The customer contact details are purely up to you. Now the key thing around this page here when you create a monthly account is the email address. Email address is a unique identifier, and it does not send any alerts, emails, or create any logins to it. What I would recommend for a lot of our MSPs who are creating monthly accounts for their customers would be using some sort of unique combination of their customer name at your own MSPdomain.com. It does not need to be a legitimate mailbox, and this will be something that will make it a lot easier for you and your team to manage moving forward as well. Again, I would normally recommend something like your customer name, like janitorsanonymous@mspedomain.com. It doesn't need to be a real mailbox. It just needs to be unique enough that we've never seen or used it in any other central account before. Once creating a new monthly central account, it will ask you to select the license type for each of the products. Now we understand you won't be using all these products all at once straight off the bat for your customers. However, because MSP licensing is a consumption based model, we will need to know what type of license would be consumed if it is consumed as such. And that's an important thing by having a selection of what licenses that you'd like for potentially the endpoint and server and mobile, and then should you wish to change it later on, that's also available. On the topic of changing licenses, if you already have a central account that you've created for a customer and they are using monthly or MSP flex licenses, you can change their licenses through the change license wizard on your partner dashboard. Once you've selected the monthly accounts that you wish to change the licenses for and then click change licenses, it will show you this particular change license screen, and it will then ask you what types of licenses that you wish to change for the selected customers. In here, you'll be offered a very similar arrangement of products and solutions that you would have seen if you were to create a new monthly account because it's the same set of solutions that you can upgrade or downgrade over time. After you've selected the licenses that you wish to change, you'll be presented with a preview of the license changes. And if you're happy with what you see, you could hit save, and those changes will be pushed through the respective tenancies. Those tenancies will then be updated with those licenses and it will start consuming those respective licenses if there is usage in them. What this means is you won't need to wait for your customer to have their computer online or their server online to start seeing that particular license change and, hence, billing implication change as well. It will actually happen straight away, and that change will be effective from there on. If a customer's device or server or endpoint is offline at that very point that you did the upgrade, when they are online, they will pick up the memo and say, oh, I just got an upgrade. I'll need to pull down the respective bits and bobs and away they go. One recommendation around upgrading a customer's licenses is, obviously, there may be additional features and functions for those licenses. So I'd advise to hop into their tenancy to see if there are any additional policies and features that you'd like to enable for them to take advantage of all of the license capabilities that they now have when they're doing an upgrade of a license. Now if you do get stuck, we do have dedicated MSP support. You can call the number, which is MSP Flex VIP support, you can email our supportteammsp. Supportservos dot com or you can simply create a support ticket straight from your partner dashboard. Typically if it is something to do with an error message or if it is something a little bit more complex starting it off with a support case number would be a little bit easier because it allows you to upload screenshots, provide unique identifiers, and things like that, which the team can utilize and get in touch with you about. But if you wanna utilize these other ways of engaging with our support team, that's also available as well. For those of you on the call, I understand that some of you may already be using some PSA tools to help if make things more efficient for you and your team there. Currently, we have PSA integrations with ConnectWise and Autotask. These PSA integrations are currently available for MSP Flex partners. And if you do have those, PSA tools already, you're able to configure them and have that ingest the respective usage associated with those customers' respective agreements as well. Here's an example of a ConnectWise PSA integration allowing for usage synchronization and also service ticket synchronization. So what that means is you would have an agreement that you've set up over in ConnectWise, and you would associate a certain customer over to that agreement. And each day, we would do a one way sync of their usage from the central account over to your ConnectWise agreement, and you may have a certain formula or a billing mechanism on that side of things where you're, arranging that. Service ticket synchronization also is to help with, having those tickets flicked on or flicked off as well. This is something that you can configure while setting up the ConnectWise PSA integration as such. For those of you on the call today who are a little bit more hands on and familiar with APIs, I would recommend you to have a look at some of the, APIs that are available at the developer.surfers.com website. It has a lot of items that, we've seen a number of MSPs use and build into their workflows to make it a little bit easier for their team to manage from a day to day perspective. But, yeah, best place to see where the developments are, it's a growing sort of site, is the developer.surfers.com. It has documentation around what's available and how to set those APIs up for yourselves. Let's shift gears a little bit to the network side of things. Now for those of you who are been with Sophos, for a little while, you probably recognize it and have seen this particular image. But the reason why I bring this up in today's MSP session is because I still feel that it's still a very powerful image to illustrate the synergies that are actually available through having Sophos solutions on a variety of layers of your customer's security stack. On the left hand side might be what typical firewalls may see straight HTTPS traffic. And as you go through a Sophos solution and through synchronized app control, what that allows is the added visibility and telemetry from things like the endpoint to feedback saying, hey. It's not just HTTPS traffic. It's actually a TeamViewer section. It's actually an open VPN activity. It might be a U-turn activity. And by having that additional visibility, it allows you and your team to have additional control for better security posture for your customer's environment there. To elaborate a little bit more into the synchronized application control, this is where the Sophos firewall may see application traffic that does not match a signature. And this is where the endpoints may be able to share the application info through the security heartbeat because they're all managed through server central. And by having this application being classified and controlled, it allows the administrator of that environment to be able to set certain categories or policies to apply and potentially block control for that customer's environment security needs. On the topic of shared telemetry, if we were to take a step further back and have a look at it holistically, Sophos has an adaptive cybersecurity ecosystem. This can be managed through managed services or it can be self managed. And the reason why we have this is it allows you to distinguish how you wanna offer the Sophos solutions and also the Sophos security stack. As you can see here, the things like the endpoint security of the network, the cloud, the email, it also ingest, information around threat intelligence from our AI labs and SecOps teams as well as from the XDR data lake. And also, if you were to dabble in APIs and also have third party integrations come into the mix as well. These solutions allow for a more holistic view for you and your organization to help address your customers' cybersecurity needs through Sophos solutions and these are all available through the Sophos MSP Flex program. Now that we've touched on the network side of things, let's go a little bit further as to how Sophos Firewall comes into the mix of the Sophos MSP Flex program. For those of you who are offering Sophos Firewalls and maybe currently offering them with a term one, two, or three year license, The Surface Firewall protection license is available through the MSP program and it is as easy as going to your partner dashboard, selecting the respective firewall, selecting the subscription, in this case extreme protection, and then hitting the save button. That file will then pick up the license and it will be, you know, consuming it and billing it accordingly. Should it come to a stage where you no longer need the MSP license for the firewall, on the MSP program, you have the flexibility of selecting none, and that firewall will no longer be billing the MSP license moving forward. The reason why we will be talking about this now and also a little bit more in the price list as well is because it allows you a bit of flexibility as to how you wanna offer the Sophos firewall solutions. Now the flexibility of the firewall MSP license allows you to get creative as to how you wanna offer Sophos firewalls. Traditionally, as most Sophos partners are currently operating, allows you to purchase a hardware as well as, let's say, the extreme protection outright. And in the customer's eyes, that would be seen as a full capital expense. Now another arrangement that would be available for Sophos MSP flex partners would be where the customer purchases just the hardware, which would be a CapEx for them. And then you as an MSP may have commercial arrangements to lease and manage and subscribe them to an extreme protection license on your MSP flex. And in your customer's eyes, that would be seen as an operational expense. So it will be an OPEX for the protection side of things. Now another option that would be available for some MSP would be if you're switched on for the MSP Flex program, you may have a plan to offer certain firewalls to your certain customers because you've got a certain style of customers, and you know you'll be purchasing a bunch of x g s one thirty sixes, a couple of x g s 21 hundreds, and a couple of x g s one a sevens. And by purchasing them, you as a partner will be owning the hardware. And if you wish to lease it out and commercialize it to your customers, you might be attaching a extreme or extreme protection with WAF and email license or any standard license to that as well. And by having that commercial arrangement between you and your customer, your customer would be effectively seeing that firewall as a full operational expenses, a monthly billing aspect for them. But, again, this is purely up to you as to how you wanna offer the Sophos firewall solutions, but we'll be able to expand into that later on in a separate discussion if need be. Another way of offering Sophos firewalls is virtual firewall as a service. The virtual firewall as a service allows you to create virtual firewall licenses straight from your partner dashboard, and you could use these virtual firewalls in virtual environments such as, let's say, a customer's Azure environment. It can start as small as a one core four with, let's say, a extreme or a standard protection license. And over time, if your customer's needs grow and they need a bigger virtual firewall, let's say, hypothetically, this is sitting on a virtual environment that's hosting a website of your customers, and they are expecting a long weekend public holiday big sale, and they're expecting a lot of traffic in that time, and they're expanding that virtual environment a little bit to cater for it, you can also increase that virtual firewall size to cater for that as well. And if you need to scale it back down, that's also available. Should it come a day that you no longer need that virtual firewall, you can decommission and delete it and it'll stop billing in the following months thereafter. This is a very flexible option and a very unique offering available through the Sophos MSP Flex program. If this is something of an interest you, feel free to reach out to us. We can have a further, dive on that as well for you, and then we can see how that goes. On the topic of firewalls, we're also gonna be looking at central firewall reporting advance. This is allowing you to be able to allocate blocks of cloud storage through a central account for your customers. It is up to a year's worth of data, and each block is about 25 gigs to your customer's firewalls. And not only does it store the data for up to three hundred and sixty five days, but you could also add schedules, reports, or you could have custom reports that you may be wanting for your customers, maybe for the cadence calls or maybe that you'd attach to their billing or you may be customizing it to their specific needs. This is an example of the file reporting with a central file reporting advanced license. As you can see here, it allows you to schedule it. It you gotta save the templates. You can have the scheduled exports that can be downloaded later on as well. And it also allows you to have different templates around maybe finding a certain report around a certain level of risk, a certain level of geo, where the IP addresses are coming from, or a certain category or how much activity has been going through social media or YouTube streaming and whatnot. This is all customizable through this and through the central file we're reporting advanced licensing. Not only does it store this data, but it also allows you to have these custom reports for your customers. And it may be very handy when you do have those cadence calls with them and also for any sort of data storage needs. At the end of day, the Sophos Firewalls will still have its own on box reporting if you still wish to go back to that. But central firewall reporting advanced licenses allows you to have a more flexible way of manipulating the data or also for scheduling the reports for your customers if need be. Alright. So now let's head over to a live demo of the partner dashboard as well as the price list. Now this is the Sophos Central partner dashboard. This is accessible via the Sophos partner portal or via ID.Sophos.com. On the dashboard here, you'll see that there shows you the number of alerts for your managed customers as well as a number of PSA sync errors as well as a number of licenses being used for your monthly customers. In the bottom left corner what you'll notice is a separate central license management. This is for your customers that are using term or trial licenses and provides you a bit of an indicator around those who may be coming up for expiry, those who have expired, or those who have already utilized their allowances as such. We'll be delving into this very shortly in terms of licensing and expiry dates and whatnot. But on the topic of Sophos Central customers, let's head over to that section now on the partner dashboard. Here in the Sophos Central customers section what it does show you is all your Sophos Central customers that are associated with your Sophos partner account. Currently it is filtered based off your customers that are active in the last thirty days. However, if you do have customers that have been inactive or is a central account that's been expired a little while ago like trials or term licenses they may show up in the 'Show all customers' filter as such. When we do look at your Sophos Central customers there are a few things to note here. For example, if you were to hover over one of these customers what you will see is the license that they have, the type of their central account and the number of licenses they've been consuming for that respective tenant. What you will notice that this is, since it's a monthly central account, it is a consumption based model on the MSP Flex program. This is what we've been talking about on this presentation today. It doesn't have any particular limit to expiry dates. Now contrast to a monthly central account like this, what you would see is a little bit further as an example, here is a central account that had a trial license on it that had a limit and an expiry date. As mentioned so far, on the MSP Flex program, the license is on a monthly central account, consumption base. You do not need to order licenses. You do not need to, you know, worry about expiration dates. There are no limits on it. If you do need to deploy and add an extra license or two, simply deploy, consume, and that license usage will be billed accordingly. Now in this particular example here, since this is a trial of a central account, if this particular customer has already had the deployment and configuration and they've come back to you saying, hey. We wish to continue this central account on monthly, you could actually convert this central account from trial to monthly straight from your partner dashboard here. And this is all done available through clicking and highlighting it as you can see that there is a slight blue tinge to that particular central account. And using the update billing button, it will allow you to convert the central account from trial to monthly. This is great for those customers that are on the fence and you wanted to do the deployment for them but they weren't ready to commit to a monthly billing arrangement with you at that time. Through this method it allows you to simply convert that and start consuming monthly MSP Flex licenses through you as a Sophos Partner. By hitting confirm any license usage in that central account will therefore be billed accordingly. This same button, the update billing button, is actually also used for conversions of central accounts from term to monthly and what this means it allows your customers that may have a renewal coming up for their Central Account and you may be thinking of putting them on your monthly arrangement through your MSP Flex, as a Sophos Partner and you could simply convert that Central Account from term to monthly by using this update billing button. There will be a disclaimer that pops up to note that if there are any residual licenses in that central account when converting from term to monthly it will be forfeited upon the conversion. So if you do have a customer that has a little bit of time left on their term licenses, do have a think about if you wish to convert that now or if you wish to do it a little bit later on closer to the expiry date as such. Now on that note about the trial central accounts that we've been talking about so far, let's have a look at how you as a partner can create partner managed trial central accounts from your partner dashboard here. This is available through the trial licenses section on the left hand side. Once you've clicked into this, this will load up any particular central account or trial licenses that you have started through your partner dashboard here. However, if you don't have any and if you wish to create a new one you could start a new trial which is right here. Now when you do start a new trial there are two options. There is one which says trial account and the trial central accounts are active for thirty days and fully licensed in that period of time. There is also another option down here you'll notice is monthly account. Do know that there we do not have trial monthly accounts. Anything that's monthly is billable. This is just an option at the very end just asking are you sure you want a trial or did you actually want a monthly account? If you wanted a trial, select a trial. If you wanted a monthly, select a monthly. As mentioned before, you can start it with a trial and then convert to a monthly if need be. Or if you if your customer is ready to go with a monthly account, you could start creating a monthly account on on day day one and deploy, configure, and have that build accordingly as such. But when you do create a trial account, you will need to fill in a few details of your customers and submit that in terms of having that, deployment and configuration available for your customer there. I won't delve too deeply into the creation of the trial account because it'll be very similar to when we create a monthly central account as well. If anything the Monthly Central account will have a few extra details as such. Now to give you a bit of a glimpse this is what you will see when you try and create a new Trial Central account. But if we were to look at monthly central accounts, where you can create that is actually through your manage customer usage or in the customer section. But since we've visited the customer section already let's head over to manage customer usage. Here on the Manage Customer Usage, what it shows is all your managed customers irrespective if they are using term licenses or monthly licenses. The reason why at the very top here we have a distinction between Partner Own Licenses and Customer Own Licenses is because MSP Flex Licenses are Partner Owned and hence Partner Owned Licenses whereas the Term Licenses are Customer Owned. In this particular demo account we don't have any termed central accounts, they are all monthly central accounts which are all therefore possibly using the MSP Flex licenses available for this particular demo partner account. What we showed earlier at the beginning of the dashboard was to do with an overview of the total license usage across your managed customers on your monthly MSP Flex. Here are those particular numbers and where they come from. They aggregate up to you as a partner and naturally you do wish to make sure that these licenses are what you have arranged between you and your customers there. And this is the aggregate but if you wanna know each of your customers breakdown you can see that this customer is using four of this but in total there's only four of them. But if you're looking at XDR, yeah, across all your monthly customers there's 11 of them and it's spread out across a few of these customer environments as such. But the reason why we brought us here today is to talk about how to create a Monthly Account. As I mentioned not only can you create a central account or that is a trial and convert that to monthly or it was a term central account and you want to convert that to monthly, that's one way of doing so. But if you want to start creating a monthly account from day one instead of doing any particular conversions, you could do that through here through the create monthly account button. And for the purpose of this demonstration, let's fill in a few details, and let's fill this in. 123 Fake Street. Let's pop it into Sydney. We're gonna need to choose the country first. Gonna choose the right one. Not Aruba, Australia, New South Wales Two Thousand. In In terms of primary customer contact, these are contact details you and your team we should reach out to that customer. It's not things that we'd reach out to. It's more for your own reference. So it might be the owner, the internal IT person of that customer's environment, or it might be the procurement person at that, place. It's up to you. For the purpose of this, let's call it Alex Davids. In terms of the email address, this is used as a unique identifier. This does not create any alerts, does not send any emails to it, does not have any credentials or any logins sent to it. It is purely just a unique identifier. We typically recommend MSPs to use something like a combination of their customer's name along with their email domain. So it might be customer42@mspdomain.com. And this may be unique enough because the key thing around it is we need to have an email address that we've never seen or used in a previous central account. This does not need to be legitimate so you do not need to rush over and create aliases for your customers. This just needs to be unique enough that we haven't seen or used it before. Some partners do have token IDs or token names that they've got for the internal references for their customers so they might use that. But, technically speaking you could have a cat walk over your keyboard and that would be also unique enough because unless it is a very, specific set of, keys and letters and strokes there, But we would recommend probably use something relevant for you and your team so that it provides a bit more, context should they need to pull up any particular information for them as such. Now if we were to proceed further with creating this particular customer, it will also ask you about the data storage location. His data storage location, we have The US, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan as options. Do note that the latter five options are Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, they are relatively new and they have select products that are supported at the moment. So if you wish to use these data storage locations do note which products are currently supported through there. I've highlighted it here on this screen here and it also there is a disclaimer saying the ones that are currently not supported. We are working towards having these newer data storage locations on parity with The US islander Germany ones, however at the point at this point in time they're not vegan and if you are looking at offering a solution through them make sure that you select the data storage location that is supportive of that product because once you create it we cannot convert or change that central account to a different data storage location. Now for those of you who wish to have a sort of dark mode we do have that available in the partner dashboard here and this provides a bit more contrast to some of the text that I just mentioned before the disclaimer of some of the data storage location, products that it is currently supporting. So if we were to choose something like Ireland there won't be these types of disclaimers because this all the products are fully supported within US, Ireland, and Germany data storage locations. Moving ahead. Whenever you do create a monthly account we'll ask you what types of licenses you wish to select for these environments. Do note that we don't bill you for licenses that you don't use. But the reason why we have this is the fundamental of the MSP Flex program because it is consumption based we need to know what license it will be billed for if it ever gets used. So at this point in time let's just change this back to light mode. If you were to use mainly endpoint and serve for your customer at the very beginning and you're not keen on using mobile at this point in time because you don't have a need for them, that's fine. Choose something along the lines we don't bill you for things you don't use. If you for example start off saying hey let's select these endpoints and server licenses, whatever you do choose in these particular fields you can always change later on and I will show you very shortly through the change licenses menu. So if this is what you like to set up for this particular monthly account for this fish and chips shop, you can go ahead scroll all the way to the bottom, tick the terms and conditions and create monthly account. Once you click on this button it would typically take you back to the manage customer usage on the left hand side here And, what we'll be doing is we'll actually go back there because we won't be creating this particular one but we will be using some of the preset ones that we've got already. Back here at the manage customer usage, once you have created one of those new monthly central accounts and there's no deployments configurations through them it probably look like this. It'll be just a shell of an account, there are no license or numbers amongst it. However, if you've started doing the deployments you might seeing things like this populate here with some numbers as such. What you'll notice that this is using four NSF X Advanced Licenses. However, for example, if you've had a discussion with this customer and you wish to upgrade them to a surface MDR solution you could do that through the MSPDFlex program by simply upgrading their license from the partner dashboard. By selecting that tenant, change licenses, it'll ask you what you want to change. For those who are eagle eyed on the call, you'll notice that these are very similar menu items that we had when we were creating the monthly account as well because these are the things that you can also change as such. But for the purpose of this demonstration let's just focus on the endpoint and server that we wish you upgrade to Sophos. Now as per the wizard here do note that anything that you do see during the change licenses wizard these are all default values. They do not represent what is currently being consumed or used in that customer's respective environment. So if you do wish to apply these changes make sure you go all the way to the very end and hit the save button. For the purpose of this, let's upgrade this customer from Interface Advanced to MDR Essentials for their endpoint and server. We scroll further down there is a little next button in in the bottom right corner. It will ask you is this what you want to change and if you are happy with what you see you hit save. That change will push to that respective customer's environment and they'll start consuming the Sophos MDR licenses. Naturally whenever you do do an upgrade of a license make sure you hop in there to turn on any sort of bells and whistles to take full advantage of those license upgrades. Typically you would not need to do too much further from a configuration perspective but we would recommend just to double check that you're actually going in there to, you know, make the most of what license that you are now upgrading to. Now for the purpose of this let's just close out of that. And besides the central accounts and their endpoints and servers, device encryption, MDR, email, user awareness, we also have Sophos Firewalls that can be licensed through the MSP Flex program. So let's head over to the firewall section now and have a look at that for you. Here in the firewall licensing and billing section there are a few things to note. On the flex billing tab what you will see here on the right hand side is the 'Request a Virtual Firewall. As I mentioned before on the MSP Flex program you can not only license a subscription on the MSP Flex program but you could also license the whole Virtual Firewall through the MSP Flex program. And what we talk about there is the Virtual Base License as well as the Subscription, the Protection Subscription can be both licensed on a monthly billing basis, you can package to your customers virtual environments as such. Let's start off with a Virtual Firewall and if you were to create these Virtual Firewall as a Service through the MSV Flex program it's as easy as clicking on the request virtual firewall, selecting a customer that you wish to assign it to, and in this case I'll just assign it to myself, And let's have a size of two up to two cores and four gig of ram with a subscription of an extreme protection license. Now whatever you do choose here similar to those central accounts on monthly MSP Flex licenses you can change this over time as well. So once I hit save I will be presented with a serial number which I can deploy and assign and register to a virtual firewall that you spin up in a virtual environment. Naturally you need to make sure that you allocate the respective resources for example up to two cores and four gigabytes RAM in that Virtual Environment to take advantage of that Virtual Firewall as a service license. If for example you get to a stage over time that you wish to upgrade or change to the size of firewall or upgrade the subscription you could definitely do that as such. But let's use an example that we already have here, that we've got a Virtual File as a Service that is a virtual firewall that can run up to 16 cores and 24 gigabytes of RAM and it has a subscription of Extreme Protection with WAF and email. If it comes to a stage where this particular customer no longer needs such a large firewall because they might have just needed it for a project for a short period of time and they're scaling back that virtual environment and they're scaling back this virtual firewall as well, you could do so by simply selecting that firewall, selecting let's say it's scaling back to a four core six end subscription and without the WAF and email. If they were to go back down to an extreme protection and hit save that file would then be consuming a lower license and a lower subscription which would typically result in a lower cost as well. At the end of day this allows you to scale up and down this particular virtual firewall and if that particular customer no longer needs this Virtual Firewall at all you can delete the firewall in its entirety. But do note that if it is still in production it may be a little bit messy if you're trying to delete a Virtual Firewall because we cannot recover this. So Do make sure that you no longer need it and then you hit the confirm button because we can't recover a deleted Virtual Firewall as a Service. Now besides the Virtual Firewall, as I mentioned before we do have our Sophos physical hardware firewalls as well and if you do have these and you wish to have the subscription license on a monthly billing basis it's a very similar sort of setup as well you'll be able to apply a subscription to them and that will be billed on a monthly billing basis. A couple of scenarios that this may happen is if your customer has a firewall, let's say an XGS appliance that came with a one, two, three year term license, it's coming up for that renewal and you're looking at adding their subscription on a monthly billing arrangement because you've already got a managed service agreement with them, an MSA, and this might be something that you're transitioning them over to and adding it as part of their monthly cost, that's fine. We can definitely help arrange that. So reach out to us. Let us know that and we can double check what the timings and their processes may be to get that converted over. Now in terms of some of the other customers that have a intention of just having the hardware bought outright and you as a partner wish to apply the MSP license from day one that's fine as well. You'll see that option straight from your partner dashboard here to select the license from none to extreme to extreme with WAF and email. Now, if it is an arrangement where you're leasing the hardware to your customer you may come to a stage where they go Hey, this this XGS is a little bit too small for us, we've just bought another company we need a bigger XGS' and you wish to take that XGS back from them but you wish to turn off that protection because you plan to repurpose it for another customer in a few months time you could take that box back and set it as none, give them a bigger box that's an XGS 2,300 and then once you've registered that you might be saying yep let's set up the Extreme Protection and hit save and that firewall will then be licensed with a Extreme Protection moving forward. Again with the examples that we're talking about just ignore this particular line here. This is for a virtual firewall. For a physical firewall this line will not be present in this particular dialog box as such. Now we talked a lot about licensing the firewall, having the firewalls scale up and down from a virtual firewall environment, but it also is a place the Central Partner Dashboard is a place where you'll be able to manage your customer's firewall straight from the Partner Dashboard itself. And this is where we will be going to the manage firewall groups in the firewall section. Let's use an example that we already have here. And in this section here, this particular firewall is already associated with my and linked to the central firewall management of Alvin Chiu Downtown Gym. It is a virtual firewall that's actually a virtual firewall that can run up to four cores and six gigabytes RAM. In light of the recent, SFO OS version 21, you're able to actually click on this and it'll launch the firewall in a brand new tab. So you can go back to your main tab and do other things for your other customers whilst that is on its way there. So as an example, this one here. This is an Alvin Downturn Gym and all you do is click on that and they'll load up in a separate window. If your techs need to hop into it to make a few tweaks you could definitely do so straight from your partner dashboard without needing to leave any of the WAN ports open or any particular Direct IP address access or any sort of a TeamViewer session that you need to hop into just to do this. So this is all managed and accessible and licensed through your Sophos Central Partner Dashboard and that's why we spend a little bit of time on that but, conscious of time let's pivot over to the price list for you now. Now this is the Sophos MSP Connect Flex price list. But before we delve into it, I do wanna make a quick note that this particular price is is for the A And Zed region, and it will be in the Australian dollars that we'll be talking about today. So for those of you who are in our neighboring regions, do take these numbers with a grain of salt. However, all the examples, functions, and formulas that we'll be talking about will still be relevant. If you are wishing to attain a copy of this price list for yourselves in your respective region, feel free to reach out to us at apjmsp@sophos.com or over to your Sophos account manager who'll also be able to help you out. Let's head back to the MSP Cost Calculator and go through that now. As discussed in the presentation thus far the Sophos MSP Connect Flex program has volume based discounts due to tier pricing and the way that works is because all your customers MSP Flex license usage aggregates up to you as a Sophos partner and by having that it provides a better purchasing price for your overall customer's MSP Flex licensing. And the way that works is this particular price is instead of thinking of each customer as an individual aggregate them up together. So for example, if you have a customer like, let's say you've got 20 customers and each customer has about 15 users. And let's say you're planning to offer the Central Internet x endpoint advance for them. So instead of thinking of fifteen, fifteen, 15, think of 20 times 15 and that would be about 300 for this cell here. And you would have noticed that the per user per month has just dropped. So a quick replay of that, 15 users for that particular license would be about $5.14 but simply 20 times 15 which is about 300 you're actually looking at about $4.18 per user per month. Now as mentioned so far the MSP Flex Program for these monthly central accounts, they are fully licensed and ready for you to consume. If you are wishing to cross sell into the Sophos Mobile solution, for example Central Mobile Advanced, out of those 300 users since I've already got a monthly central account and you want to offer this as well, let's say you've got a couple of them using that and that's a little bit there and if you're also adding as part of your bundle and offer because your customers need you to manage their Bitlock and FileVault encryption you could do that through Sophos Central via Sophos Central Device Encryption. And, let's say you've got about, let's say, a hundred of these. And by doing that, the reason why I'm putting these numbers in here is because I understand that the next price band is actually the 500. Right now we're about $4.30. Now out of those customers that you're offering the endpoint, the mobile, device encryption, maybe some of them are also looking at using Sophos email advice, Sophos Central email advance and let's say you've got about 50 of those. Okay? So right now your total quantity of licenses used in the user subscription category is about $1,627.7 Now again this is your buy price. It is up to you how much or how little you wish to sell this at. So if you're looking at this and you go well you know your next price band is $500 If you were to let's say offer 20 licenses of FishRET to maybe a couple of customers or trying to fish for new business you might be able to do that. And by simply doing that you would have noticed that the total quantity is now 500. The partner cost is now down to $1,471.4 Effectively bringing down the overall cost of all these licenses. Now once you're at this particular price band bear in mind it actually has reduced the cost of everything in this blue category. So a quick replay of that. So right now have a quick glance of these numbers and you would notice that they all shift down once I've put 20 in this field here. And what you would also understand is, not only can you have them on these licenses if you're wanting to upgrade some of these customers from any sort of X end point advance to the Sophos MDR solution you would also have that particular buying price as well because you don't need to have 500 of that particular license to get that buy price. You just need to have that particular volume of licenses in the user subscription and you're able to have that. So let's say you've got 50 of them, hop over to the MDR solution. You're still able to retain that particular 500 buy price. Now if you are curious where all these price bands are it is all in the SKU sheet which you'll be able to refer to. Now there are different category bands for different sections as such. Now heading back to the MSP Cost Calculator, if you were to look at the Service Subscription you do have the server side of things. They are much narrower bands so if you do have 20 of these and let's say you've got five of these you would notice that that's already immediately taking you to the next price band. Now on that note let's hop over to the device subscription which talks about, as mentioned before if you're looking at licensing your customer's firewalls with an MSP license. So as mentioned, if your customer has an XGS one twenty six that's coming up for renewal but you don't want to renew it for one, two, three years and you wanna put that license on a monthly billing basis, you can, yeah, put that on there and it'll be about $53.50 for that Extreme Protection license. Alternatively, if you have an arrangement where you have the hardware already purchased outright, the brand new boxes, there's no licenses, and as part of your managed service agreement, you wanna put a MSP license moving forward. Let's say you bought a batch of XGS 120 eight's and that's your right size for your type of customers and you want to put MSP licenses in those you could definitely do so straight from the day one. And if you have a few more, let's say you've got about six of these and let's say you've got about eight of those and let's say you've got another bunch of these as well. What you would have noticed is there was a slight shift in all the prices because again the more licenses you consume in this green device category the cheaper the per unit cost would be for these particular licenses. This particular category also includes the licenses for the support licenses of Sophos and Sophos. So if you do have customers that are using those Sophos and Switches and need the support licenses that can be licensed through the MSP Flex program and it'll also add towards that device count as such. Further down the price list you will also notice that there is the cloud subscription. So this is the cloud optics license where it is based off the continuous compliance and cloud monitoring for your customers current environments. If you do wish to have that particular type of license it is something that would be scaling up and down based off the volume of licenses you consume for that. As mentioned briefly in the presentation, we do have the Central Firewall Reporting Advanced license which allows you to allocate blocks of storage into your customers central accounts to store up to three sixty five days of storage or their firewall data for compliance purposes or for reporting purposes that they may have. Again this is a fixed block of $4 per 25 gig per month. Now as you can probably tell that there can be a multitude of iterations that you can review for this particular price list here. So I would highly recommend getting a copy for yourself to get a better understanding where this may fit in for you and your customers and how you can package this for your customers as such. Now all is well and good and understanding what this price is and all the aggregate billing model and the volume basis count due to the tier pricing might work but let's have a look at how to actually get you onto this program. Allow me a moment as I switch back to the presentation We'll go through the final steps about how to get this switched on for you. Alright, so the journey to the MSP Connect Flex program requires a few simple steps. One, we naturally hope you have or are building towards a managed services business model. You will need to have a MSP Connect application. If you are already a service partner, you may need to accept some MSP Ts and Cs, which we can direct you to on the partner portal. And there are a couple of training items that will be required. One of them is to do with the sales fundamentals. This is s c zero one. This talks about the variety of Sophos solutions that are available for you to sell through Sophos. And also the MSP zero one, which talks about many of the nuances that we've touched on today on the MSP Connect Flex program. And the last thing is a distributor needs to approve monthly billing. Your Sophos distributor will need to approve that because as you can appreciate, it is a monthly billing consumption based licensing model. So, naturally, your Sophos MSP distributor will need to confirm that you've got respect to credit to be able to cater for that. But at the end of the day, if you're not too sure where you are on this journey, reach out to our team. We'll be able to check for you there. We'll be able to have a look at if you've done this certain training, if you need to get a distributor approval, or if you need to apply or whatnot. If you're on this call today and you're not a Sophos partner yet and you wish to read up on this and also register, head over to the Sophos.com/msp website, and we'll be able to provide a bit more detail around that as well for some reading material. Now a brief overview of who does what, Sophos distribution, the MSP yourselves, and the respective customers. Sophos would have the legal relationship with MSPs. We'll be providing you with the respective train, certification, helping you with the synchronized security discussions and enablements, the level to support to the MSP. The distributor would be the one who helps you handle the hardware logistics. They'd be providing the MSP terms, the credit, the monthly billing model, the invoices for MSP, and they'd be the ones effectively paying Sophos. An MSP yourselves would be the one who would be providing the level one support to your customer. You'll be provisioning and configuring their environments. You'd be invoicing your customers through your own commercial arrangements, and you'll be purchasing it through distribution. At the end day, we don't have a hard and fast what's a level one support or what's a level two support. We would hope that you would have sufficient training to be able to engage with your customers from a deployment configuration discussion perspective. But if you do need help, reach out to us. Distribution are also enabled as well to help out with those types of discussions. In terms of our support teams, as mentioned earlier, we've also got the, support teams at Sophos, which is m s p dot support and also the support tickets that you can submit and also the support hotline that you can give a call on as well. So don't be too afraid of what's a level one or a level two, but just reach out if you do need help. Some of the next steps, if you haven't already done so, you will need to accept some MSP Ts and Cs which are available through the partner portal. It's in the settings. There will be an apply to be an MSP partner. Fill in a few items. Hit submit. The two training items that I mentioned before is the SC zero one and the MSP zero one. And the third item is the MSP monthly billing credit approval from your preferred Sophos distributor. And, yeah, let us know how you go. If you have any questions, reach out to our team at apjmsp@sophos.com.