Forcepoint Unleashes New Platform, Adds Partner Investment

Forcepoint on Thursday rolled out its new Converged Security Platform, which enables secure migration of data, applications and business operations to the cloud.

The company also announced strategic investments in a new technology partner ecosystem. These partnerships will deliver customers integrated offerings that extend Forcepoint’s risk-adaptive protection across existing security infrastructure, including cloud, identity, network and endpoint.

Kevin White, Forcepoint’s senior director of channel, tells us at the outset, “our intent is to engage a select number of partners to join as early access candidates for the new solution.” Those early-adopting partners will likely have an inside lane into transacting and providing delivery services, he said.

Forcepoint’s Kevin White

“The channel motion with this solution is still being built and details will be forthcoming,” he said. “We believe this will be a tremendous differentiator for our partners in delivering solutions to our joint customers.”

The new security platform will be “very important” for MSSPs as it will enable them to deliver a new set of differentiated cloud-based services to their customers to drive loyalty in a way that also increases margins, White said.

“We’re finding distributed organizations are increasingly looking to experts (notably MSSPs) to recommend, procure and administer both the connectivity and the protection that is needed at each of their remote sites,” he said. “The [new platform] will enable MSSPs to combine networking and security into the type of leading-edge offering that customers are looking for, starting with our solution for securing remote sites and expanding as more and more of our unique portfolio of behavior-centric and risk-adaptive security technologies is folded into the platform. In addition, the extensibility of our platform will enable MSSPs to integrate our solutions with external systems to further differentiate their offerings. Finally, being a cloud-based platform will help MSSPs to reduce their ongoing operating expenses and generate higher margins.”

The first offering available on the new platform, Dynamic Edge Protection, will allow enterprises to transform their network and security architectures with connectivity to take full advantage of the cloud across distributed application and network environments.

“Forcepoint’s approach to cybersecurity is fundamentally different,” White said. “We bring a unique, behavior-centric perspective that enables enforcement policies to be automatically tailored to each individual’s actions and the risk they are posing at any given moment. Forcepoint’s partners will be on the forefront of a new generation of risk-adaptive security that will help them deliver greater value to their customers and differentiate from their competitors.”

Through its partner community, Forcepoint enables customers to simplify collaboration between vendors to create an integrated security stack. Inaugural technology alliances include AWS, IBM Security, Microsoft, Citrix, Boldon James, Ping Identity, Seclore and more.

“The ecosystem we are creating around the Forcepoint Converged Security Platform will expand the range of solutions that our partners can offer and provide opportunities to tie together different enterprise systems in new and unique ways,” White said.

“Behavior-based cybersecurity is tailor-made for the era of mobility and cloud because it enables enterprises to detect and respond faster to risk than legacy paradigms that focus only on protecting infrastructure,” said Matt Moynahan, Forcepoint’s CEO. “Forcepoint’s human-centric approach to security enables our customers to protect their people and critical data against the most sophisticated attackers, while freeing them to conduct their business or mission in the most efficient and agile way possible.”