IT Nation Secure: ConnectWise Helps MSPs with Cyber Insurance, Unveils Simpler Branding
This year's IT Nation Secure is all about trust.
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MSPs have a hard time getting cyber insurance, and it’s also tough for customers, ConnectWise’s Raffael Marty said. ConnectWise has announced a new partnership with ControlCase to ease the process of getting cyber insurance.
“ControlCase has built a assessment capability actually on top of our ConnectWise Manage tool or platform as project templates,” he said. “So when you’re working with a customer or a prospect as an MSP, you want to understand how they look and then, what’s their security posture. Do they have certain processes in place? Do they have certain security tools in place? With the ControlCase tool, you can go through a questionnaire to answer and understand where is the risk and where does the customer, the prospect stand? And that’s the tool that is going to be made available for free on top of ConnectWise Manage for a self assessment of the customer.”
MSPs can then go in and remediate the problems they see and then get certified by ControlCase for compliance with security and privacy requirements, Marty said.
ConnectWise also is partnering with insurance broker Fifthwall Solutions. It too is on top of ConnectWise Manage.
“Basically they have an insurance questionnaire,” Marty said. “They have a bunch of questions that they go through with their insurance applications. That questionnaire is automatically answered with the same tool; it sends them over to Fifthwall and they will come back with an insurance quote for the customer.”
Also, MSPs can provide evidence of remediation to improve the chances of getting cyber insurance, he said.
For partners interacting with ConnectWise on its cybersecurity products, it’s been complicated in terms of the offerings and names, Marty said.
“They’ve been called Fortify Assessment, Fortify SaaS and Fortify Endpoint, and it’s not quite clear what they are,” he said. “We’re changing the names to be descriptive for all of the products. I think partners are going to applaud this because it’s like, ‘Finally, you heard us; it’s just too complicated.’ So we’re going to have a ConnectWise MDR, a ConnectWise EDR, and it’s a ConnectWise SIEM, just getting rid of all these other ancillary names. So with that, we’re relaunching the ConnectWise Risk Assessment Tool, and that is another tool to help you with evidence collection. It’s super well-suited today for pre-sales engagement. So if you have a new customer or even if you have an existing customer, and you want to start selling security to them, basically on a call with them, you send them a link to a tool, they download it, it runs a full assessment of the machine, deletes itself and sends all the results back to our cloud. You get a pretty good understanding of that company, and then the MSP can say. ‘OK, let’s put a plan together.”
Making it simpler to do business with ConnectWise is the theme here, Marty said.
ConnectWise is moving collectively to a shared platform, the Asio platform. It’s a microservices architecture where ConnectWise RMM is already running.
“We’re moving more and more security tools onto that same platform to use these shared services and be much more integrated,” Marty said. “And in the end, the customer logs into one portal. They don’t have to go to the security tool or PSA. It’s going to be an all-in-one interface. The risk assessment tool is our first product that we have in Asio. So you log into the same screen, there’s a security landing page now, and you can access your risk assessment tool there. And so we’re bringing all this together and we’re showing progress on that journey that we announced last year at IT Nation Connect.“
ConnectWise’s new incident response service will take center stage at IT Nation Secure. It helps MSPs and their end customers to mitigate and recover from security incidents.
“We to want to be as proactive, ‘left of boom’ if at all possible,” said ConnectWise’s Patrick Beggs. “But in case something does happen, it’s really bringing in the right skill sets at the right time with the right capabilities to be able to help them identify what’s going on, contain and recover from any and all types of events.”
One of the key takeaways from IT Nation Secure is ConnectWise is doing whatever it can to keep its platform secure, Marty said.
“And then from a product perspective, we’re innovating, and we hear you,” he said. “We’re building things you have been asking for. We have finished the integrations of the other acquisitions we’ve made a couple of years ago. We have a stable platform and we’re going to grow with you. We want to be your trusted partner on this journey of cybersecurity and not just selling your products. Of course, we want to make a profit and MSPs want to make a profit. But how do we have a symbiotic relationship where we don’t just sell products, but we also help them establish a security business and then grow their security business?
We relaunched our partner program a year ago and we have 1,600 partners in there right now. And we have stats where we show they grow three to five times faster on the security side than anybody else because we get them started, and then they become a rocket ship.”
One of the key takeaways from IT Nation Secure is ConnectWise is doing whatever it can to keep its platform secure, Marty said.
“And then from a product perspective, we’re innovating, and we hear you,” he said. “We’re building things you have been asking for. We have finished the integrations of the other acquisitions we’ve made a couple of years ago. We have a stable platform and we’re going to grow with you. We want to be your trusted partner on this journey of cybersecurity and not just selling your products. Of course, we want to make a profit and MSPs want to make a profit. But how do we have a symbiotic relationship where we don’t just sell products, but we also help them establish a security business and then grow their security business?
We relaunched our partner program a year ago and we have 1,600 partners in there right now. And we have stats where we show they grow three to five times faster on the security side than anybody else because we get them started, and then they become a rocket ship.”
CONNECTWISE IT NATION SECURE — ConnectWise is unveiling new solutions to help MSPs gain cyber insurance. It also has simplified the branding of its cybersecurity products.
Taking place in Orlando, Florida, IT Nation Secure aims to help MSPs reduce risk and transform their business. Streamlining cybersecurity service delivery for clients is another goal of the conference.
Raffael Marty is ConnectWise’s general manager of cybersecurity. He said the theme of this year’s IT Nation Secure is all about trust.
ConnectWise’s Raffael Marty
“We’re going to grow with the MSPs, helping them grow faster and really focusing on how do we become a close partner with the MSP,” he said. “We need to earn that trust again. We need to earn the trust of our partners because trust is not something you just have. And then tying it into security, trust or secure is a big piece of that … making sure that MSPs trust our infrastructure, our tools. But then also, how do we help the MSP be a trusted entity for their customer so that they can rely on working with the MSPs on a customer level?”
Cybersecurity More Important than Ever for MSPs
Patrick Beggs is ConnectWise’s new CISO. He said in today’s evolving threat landscape, it’s most important for MSPs to know their attack surface and what their assets are.
ConnectWise’s Patrick Beggs
ConnectWise focuses on third-party penetration testing and compromise assessments, he said.
“We’re actually letting folks within our third parties come in our environments and looking for any active compromises,” Beggs said. “They’re going to start exploring internally and looking for weaknesses. The point of this is to have remediation efforts that we’re going to be able to identify and mature from. Every organization has an issue for something like that. If somebody tells you they don’t, they’re lying to you or they just don’t have an idea of their security.”
ConnectWise is transitioning more to the threat intelligence side of cybersecurity, he said.
See our slideshow above for more from ConnectWise IT Nation Secure.
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