5 Tips for Scaling Cloud Security Without Adding Complexity

For years, managed service providers (MSPs) have secured customer cloud environments through periodic reviews of each tenant. That approach worked when a customer ran two or three cloud applications. As organizations adopt more SaaS applications, the number of environments, identities, and configurations to monitor also increases.

The challenge is already visible. According to the Cloud Security Alliance’s State of SaaS Security Report 2025, 57% of organizations report fragmented SaaS administration. For MSPs, this complexity presents an opportunity to expand their offerings.

Scaling cloud security cost-effectively requires finding the right balance between expanding protection and keeping the resources needed to deliver it under control. 

Here are five key strategies that can help MSPs grow without adding complexity to their operations.

1. Automate Discovery to Reduce Manual Work

Regular reviews can quickly become a demanding task when an MSP manages multiple customers. Reviewing configurations, identifying unknown applications, and checking connections takes time and makes it difficult to maintain an up-to-date view of each environment.

Automating discovery helps analysts identify cloud risks and configuration drift across all customers, reducing manual investigations.

2. Centralize Visibility to Manage More Customers

When each customer is managed as a separate environment, maintaining comprehensive visibility becomes more challenging. A centralized view across customers makes it easier to identify where exposure is highest, prioritize issues, and focus resources where they are most needed.

Centralized management also makes it easier to maintain consistent protection across accounts and make better use of team capacity without proportionally increasing the resources dedicated to each customer.

3. Continuously Monitor Cloud Apps to Detect New Risks

Cloud environments are constantly changing. Users adopt applications, modify configurations, and create new connections, all of which can increase their level of risk exposure. A point-in-time review may be accurate when delivered, but it becomes out of date quickly as client environments change daily.

Continuous monitoring helps detect Shadow IT and Shadow AI, insecure configurations, and identity threats before they lead to an incident.

4. Automate Remediation to Free Up Analysts

Detecting a threat is only the first step. If every alert requires manual investigation and remediation, the workload will grow alongside the number of customers.

Guided remediation identifies the security issue and the change required. Bulk remediation applies that change across every tenant with the same finding in one action. Security analysts can focus on situations that require specialized analysis, while repetitive tasks are handled more efficiently.

5. Turn Cloud Security into a Growth Opportunity

When cloud protection can be delivered efficiently, it can also become a higher-value component of an MSP's offering.

Adding cloud application security can increase revenue per customer without requiring a proportional increase in resources. A broader offering can also improve margins, strengthen customer retention, and differentiate an MSP from other providers.

CloudDR: Scale Cloud Protection Without Adding Complexity

To put these strategies into practice, MSPs need comprehensive visibility to keep pace with changes in client cloud environments. WatchGuard Cloud Detection and Response (CloudDR) is an AI-native, agentless platform that enables MSPs to continuously monitor customers' cloud applications, identify where risk is concentrated, and remediate fast. It detects Shadow IT and Shadow AI, misconfigurations, and identity threats, giving MSPs a more complete view of their customers' exposures.

CloudDR also includes guided, automated, and bulk remediation capabilities that reduce the need for manual investigations. Each finding identifies what is wrong and the change required, and identical findings across tenants are remediated in one action. This makes it easier to standardize security across customers and apply actions at scale as the number of managed environments grows.

With WatchGuard CloudDR, MSPs can extend protection to 40+ applications, including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce, without incurring the same operational effort for each new environment. Automation and centralized visibility enable them to make better use of resources, improve margins, and bundle cloud security into their existing offerings.