Have you ever had a client ask, “How much risk are we facing?” and all you had was a pie chart to show them? In 2025, that doesn’t cut it. Today’s business executives expect more. They want risk explained in clear, unambiguous terms—and most of all, they want numbers. Not just because it sounds smart but because it helps them make decisions, get budgets approved, and sleep at night.
Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) helps MSSPs turn security work into real business value. With CRQ, you’re helping your clients understand risk, prioritize smartly, and report confidently. It makes the work you do easier to explain—and it makes it a whole lot easier for your clients to appreciate the work you do for them.
What Is Cyber Risk Quantification?
CRQ turns cyber risk into numbers. It answers questions like: “If this attack hits, how much could we lose?” That number helps companies understand what matters. It also helps managed security MSSPs show real value.
Instead of vague high/medium/low ratings, CRQ assigns concrete values – like an estimated financial loss if a breach occurs. For example, a risk of a ransomware attack might be quantified as a potential loss of $2 million. By putting cyber risk in business language (aka money), CRQ helps decision-makers understand which risks must be dealt with and in which order.
CRQ’s Evolution
Not very long ago, cyber risk quantification was a niche exercise for the largest MSSPs. ‘It’s rapidly becoming a sought-after practice for organizations of all sizes. CRQ techniques have quickly evolved in recent years, moving from spreadsheet guesswork to automated platforms like Centraleyes that leverage global risk data.
However, the journey hasn’t been easy. Many security leaders have learned that adopting CRQ tools isn’t a silver bullet. Gartner analysts predicted that by 2025, 50% of the best MSSP providers in cybersecurity will have tried – and failed – to use CRQ to drive decisions. The high failure rate is a reality check: organizations know CRQ is important, but implementing it effectively is challenging. Common pitfalls include poor quality data, overly complex models, or analysis paralysis. Another recent Gartner Security Summit highlighted that doing CRQ manually or with too much detail can overwhelm stakeholders, causing “decision fatigue” for the board. The trend now is towards streamlined, automated CRQ, focusing on the minimum effective insights that cut through noise. In practice, that means using tools to continuously quantify risk and present only the most relevant facts.
Why CRQ Matters More Than Ever (Especially for MSSPs)
For MSSPs, embracing CRQ isn’t just trend-chasing – it directly addresses core challenges in delivering and proving security value. Here’s why cyber risk quantification has become mission-critical:
Clients Demand Business Context
Today, we’re used to doing things the “easy” way. Clients don’t want dashboards full of alerts they need to work through. They want to know: what did you stop, and how much did it save them? CRQ puts a dollar sign in front of their eyes. You shift from saying, “We blocked such and such threats,” to “We reduced your risk by $3 million.” That’s the kind of language that really talks to people. It makes life easier for them. (Can’t we all relate to that?)
Better Decision Making & Prioritization
Without quantification, prioritizing security efforts can be a guessing game driven by IT gut feelings. An MSSP might treat a vulnerability on a trivial system with the same urgency as one on a mission-critical server. With CRQ, providers can see which risks carry the biggest financial impact and likelihood and prioritize accordingly. This data-driven approach ensures limited resources are allocated to the most dangerous and costly threat. It also prevents over-reacting to low-impact issues. (Why spend $150k of effort to mitigate a risk that would cost $100k if it happened?)
Enhanced Board and Stakeholder Confidence
When an MSSP uses CRQ, it arms its clients with robust evidence for the boardroom. According to a Gartner survey conducted between April and June 2023, 52% of IT and information security leaders reported that adopting Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ) increased board and leadership confidence in their security programs. Additionally, 51% noted that CRQ made it easier to engage risk owners in remediation efforts. Nearly half (46%) observed an improved understanding of cyber-risk exposure across the business. Overall, 97% of organizations that implemented CRQ reported tangible benefits from its adoption.
Competitive Edge for MSSPs
The MSSP market in 2025 is highly competitive and commoditized in areas like monitoring and alerting. Offering CRQ elevates an MSSP’s role from a commodity provider to a strategic partner. MSSPs that can quantify and financially justify their security recommendations stand out. Imagine an MSSP that tells a client: “By investing $$ in our advanced threat hunting, you reduce your annualized cyber risk exposure by 30%, equivalent to $3 million in avoided loss.” This is a compelling value proposition that many traditional MSSPs can’t match. In fact, forward-looking providers and even cyber insurers are moving this direction – some cyber insurance companies are launching their own MSSP services with promises of quantified risk reduction and insurance discounts for clients. An MSSP that lacks CRQ capabilities risks losing business to these evolving competitors who bundle risk quantification into their offerings.
Regulatory and Insurance Benefits
Quantified risk data doesn’t just impress clients – it also satisfies regulators and insurers. Many industries have to perform risk assessments for compliance; using CRQ, an MSSP can help clients demonstrate a quantified grasp of their risk posture, which regulators see as a sign of a mature security program. Likewise, cyber insurance underwriters are more sophisticated in 2025, often asking for detailed risk metrics. An MSSP that can supply clients with CRQ reports will help them negotiate better insurance premiums and coverage. (Insurers LOVE to see that an organization understands its exposure and has data to back it up.)
Don’t Forget the Human Element
Cyber risk isn’t only about firewalls and phishing attempts. It’s also about people—employees, vendors, and third-party contractors. That’s why some MSSPs are using CRQ to look beyond the network and factor in human risk, like whether background checks are being done consistently.
Why does that matter? Because a managed compliance background check can lead to insider threats, access misuse, or data leaks. Quantifying the risk of those gaps—even roughly—can help clients understand the business impact of weak onboarding practices.
With CRQ, MSSPs can capture this kind of exposure and tie it to real-world outcomes. It’s one more way to tell a complete risk story.
Implementing CRQ: How MSSPs Can Get Started
Centraleyes provides a dedicated multi-tenant console that sits on top of its risk and compliance solutions, letting MSSPs manage all their clients in one interface. Through this single pane of glass, an MSSP can run analytics on each client’s security program and generate risk scores that quantify the client’s cyber risk posture. These scorecards translate technical assessments into business-friendly metrics, giving both the MSSP and the client a clear view of where the biggest exposures are. The platform’s built-in tools help providers slice and dice the data – for example, viewing a client’s risk trending down over time or comparing risk between different business units. All of this strengthens the MSSP-client relationship and even creates opportunities to offer new insights and services.
You start with a built-in risk assessment. Centraleyes helps you quantify risk from day one. You pull in data from scans, frameworks, and business inputs. The platform handles the math—generating real-world numbers like probable loss and top risk exposure, broken down by asset or business unit.
To communicate results, Centraleyes offers intuitive dashboards and reports designed for executives. One feature provides beautifully visualized board reports that communicate cyber risk in plain language – ideal for MSSPs preparing quarterly business reviews or answering a client’s board inquiries. Instead of handing over a spreadsheet, the MSSP can provide a polished report showing, for example, “Top 5 Risks and Their Financial Exposure,” backed by graphics. The platform also automates many labor-intensive tasks (like maintaining risk registers and compliance mappings), freeing up the MSSP’s analysts to focus on interpreting and acting on the risk data rather than crunching numbers.
Want to show your client how their risk is trending?
You’ve got the graphs.
Need a board report?
One-click, and you’re there.
You log in, and the story is already written—with numbers to back it up.
If you’ve been thinking about how to level up your services, this is it. CRQ isn’t just a feature. It’s the future of how MSSPs deliver value.
Ready to show your clients the numbers that matter? Contact Centraleyes today.
The post Why MSSPs Must Prioritize Cyber Risk Quantification in 2025 appeared first on Centraleyes.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Centraleyes authored by Rebecca Kappel. Read the original post at: https://www.centraleyes.com/mssps-must-prioritize-cyber-risk-quantification/
