I work with cloud resellers everywhere between London, England and Wellington, New Zealand. But from one geography to the next, many of them still only possess a surface familiarity with the basics of cybersecurity.

Given the menace that small and mid-sized customers face from cyberattacks, this is something that organizations need to fix. And they can – I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s look at the reasons behind this lingering knowledge gap.

Up until recently, most cloud service providers didn’t feel the urgency to help their customers gain a deep understanding of the threat landscape. To be sure, they were aware of threats like ransomware when it popped up on their news feeds. But they’d be hard-pressed to explain in depth the differences between ransomware and, say, Adware. Instead, they dealt with new threats as they appeared. In practice, that meant strategy took a backseat to tactics as they scrambled to figure out what the new threats meant.