The Small Business Security Problem
43% of cyberattacks target small businesses. 60% of small businesses that suffer a breach close within six months. And the average small business spends less than $500/year on cybersecurity.
The math doesn't work. Enterprise security suites cost $50–150 per seat per year. A 50-person company is looking at $2,500 to $7,500 annually just for endpoint protection — before adding a firewall, SIEM, email security, and the IT staff to manage it all. Most small businesses choose to roll the dice instead.
1-SEC changes that equation. Zero licensing cost. One binary per server. No per-seat pricing. No annual renewals. The same 16 security modules that protect enterprise infrastructure, running on a small business's single server or VPS.
Why MSPs Should Care
If you're a Managed Service Provider handling 20–100 small business clients, your security tooling costs are a major line item. Per-seat licensing across all your clients adds up fast, and every vendor wants a multi-year commitment.
Deploy in Minutes, Not Days
SSH into a client's server, run one command, and 1-SEC is running with production-ready defaults. No agent installation wizard, no cloud console registration, no license key activation. For an MSP doing 5 new client onboardings a month, this saves hours per deployment.
Centralized Alerting
Point each client's 1-SEC webhook at your central monitoring endpoint. All client alerts flow into your existing PSA or ticketing system. You get a unified view of security across your entire client base without paying for a separate SIEM per client.
Zero Licensing Overhead
No per-seat calculations. No true-up audits. No license compliance headaches. 1-SEC is AGPLv3 — deploy it on every client server at zero cost. Your margin on security services becomes pure labor, not labor minus licensing.
White-Label Friendly
The REST API and JSON output let you build your own dashboards and reports branded to your MSP. Show clients their security posture in your portal, not a third-party vendor's dashboard. The open source license means you can customize the deployment to match your service offering.
What Small Businesses Actually Get Hit With
Small businesses don't face APTs and nation-state actors. They face automated attacks that scan the entire internet and exploit whatever they find:
— Credential stuffing against email and admin logins (Auth Fortress) — SQL injection and XSS against web applications (Injection Shield) — Ransomware delivered via phishing or exposed RDP (Ransomware Interceptor + Runtime Watcher) — Business Email Compromise using spoofed domains (Deepfake Shield) — Cloud misconfigurations exposing customer data (Cloud Posture Manager)
Every one of these is covered by a 1-SEC module running with default settings. No tuning required. No security expertise needed. Install it and it works.
Compliance for Free
Small businesses increasingly need to demonstrate security compliance — SOC2 for SaaS companies, HIPAA for healthcare, PCI-DSS for anyone handling payments. 1-SEC's continuous monitoring, audit logging, and exportable reports satisfy the "appropriate security controls" requirements that auditors look for.
For MSPs, this is a differentiator. You can offer compliance-ready security monitoring as part of your managed service package without adding a $10,000/year compliance tool to your stack.