IT Nation Secure: ConnectWise Unleashes Security360, Sidekick for Security

ConnectWise’s teams are continuing to innovate and create “breakthrough” experiences for the IT Nation, said ConnectWise’s Ameer Karim.

“We first brought you Asio, the foundation for all ConnectWise products and the world's first purpose-built platform for MSPs,” he told attendees in his keynote. “Then it was all about hyperautomation to streamline and automate your business, and IT processes. And today, ConnectWise Security 60 is a groundbreaking, multi-layered cybersecurity solution, and it's all built on Asio. Security360 will become your single source of truth for all things cyber, unifying the entire experience into one beautiful experience. Aggregate, correlate and normalize the data across different sources, different vendors and tools, making it easy to take action via automated workflows. And the best part of all, strengthen your clients’ security posture with a new MSP risk scoring system.”

During IT Nation Connect last November, ConnectWise first launched Sidekick, an AI companion to enhance efficiency and ingenuity for TSPs and SMBs.

“For them, it was all about making complex scripting much easier,” Karim said. “Then with Sidekick for PSA, it was about reducing time to resolution and delivering better customer service. In fact, partners using Sidekick for PSA are seeing a 20% decrease in time to resolution and 30% increase in technician efficiency. If the first six months are telling, it has been a hit with our early adopters. With that, I'm pleased to announce Sidekick for Security, now your cybersecurity companion.”

Sidekick for Security represents a big part of how ConnectWise continues to build on its investments around hyperautomation, and how workflow automation can drive productivity, efficiency and so on, he said.

ConnectWise has been providing its MDR service for all of its leading endpoint protection tools, including SentinelOne, Bitdefender and Microsoft Defender for Business, Karim said.

“However, we understand that more of your Microsoft environment needs the same level of protection,” he said. “We can now safeguard your Microsoft 365 environment with our new MDR for Microsoft 365, meaning enhanced security and protection for your components of Microsoft stack. Our team of security analysts will constantly be monitoring and responding to threats in your M365 environment, and looking out for any suspicious activity, whether it be business email compromise (BEC), especially if your team uses Microsoft Mail, unusual login attempts, malicious emails, attachments, data exfiltration, compromise account, and the list goes on and on.”

Feedback from MSPs is instrumental in the development of new ConnectWise innovations, Karim said.

“You can't design new tools without not having any kind of user feedback and I'm a big believer of that, everything from user experience to design, to what is most important to them, how they view the product and what things matter the most when it comes to managing security,” he said. “My UX team, my product team worked very closely with the respective folks in the partner base. We have the cybersecurity advisory council, we have a bunch of cybersecurity MSPs on our corporate advisory council and we have a focus group session with our usability team. So there's a tremendous amount that goes in and we get a tremendous amount of feedback from each of these respective councils and folks that share different perspectives on the industry. They sit in different parts of the organization at the MSP, but also from an industry perspective.”

During his keynote, Jason Magee, ConnectWise's CEO, told attendees it’s important to “start somewhere” and “don’t get left behind” when it comes to AI and cybersecurity.

Patrick Beggs, ConnectWise’s CISO, said a good place to start is to “start understanding it.”

“It's literally a Google search,” he said. “Start understanding it, and for the positive. I was telling folks I use it internally for a lot of manual tasks, document creation and things like that. Obviously we trust, but verify. We put human eyes on it. We don't just autonomously trust it in the sense that there's checks and balances in place. But from an MSP or TSP standpoint, understand how they can leverage it for their business. It’s just going to save you money, it really is. Obviously with the products that we're offering, and our understanding of our partner base and what their needs are, it is kind of turnkey if they come and check out some of the even more simplified things that we're offering. It could be hey, can this be something that my business can use? It's raise your head up. I know folks are so heads down doing their job, but if somebody presents an opportunity for me to save time and make more money, I’m going to take it all day long.”

Read more from Patrick Beggs in the upcoming June 10 edition of the Gately Report.

Theresa Payton, CEO and founder of Fortalice Solutions, a boutique cybersecurity and intelligence services company, gave the guest keynote on Day 2 of IT Nation Secure. She served as the first female CIO for the White House during the President George W. Bush administration.

Payton gave three chilling cybersecurity predictions for 2025. The first one is “bots will betray us.”

“What I mean is they will be set up in such a way that these bots will actually pretend to be real people,” she said. “The bots betraying us will actually start to have infiltration by cybercriminals and fraudster units, and so they'll start tricking people out of their information, out of their identity information. So you think you're actually having a legitimate conversation with an organization, but it's actually a man-in-the-middle attack.”

Payton’s second prediction is that biometrics, including thumbprints and voice, are stolen and criminal units will then be able to present your own biometrics and fool authentication systems.

“And then the next one is spies among us,” she said. “So it is my prediction that by 2025, one of the major platforms for customer service chatbots that you can customize and make it your own, it'll actually be a third-party supply chain attack, and some type of either a nation state or cybercriminal syndicate will actually be in the platform and committing espionage – economic espionage, political espionage – and take whatever they want because they're in the platform itself.”

Theresa Payton, CEO and founder of Fortalice Solutions, a boutique cybersecurity and intelligence services company, gave the guest keynote on Day 2 of IT Nation Secure. She served as the first female CIO for the White House during the President George W. Bush administration.

Payton gave three chilling cybersecurity predictions for 2025. The first one is “bots will betray us.”

“What I mean is they will be set up in such a way that these bots will actually pretend to be real people,” she said. “The bots betraying us will actually start to have infiltration by cybercriminals and fraudster units, and so they'll start tricking people out of their information, out of their identity information. So you think you're actually having a legitimate conversation with an organization, but it's actually a man-in-the-middle attack.”

Payton’s second prediction is that biometrics, including thumbprints and voice, are stolen and criminal units will then be able to present your own biometrics and fool authentication systems.

“And then the next one is spies among us,” she said. “So it is my prediction that by 2025, one of the major platforms for customer service chatbots that you can customize and make it your own, it'll actually be a third-party supply chain attack, and some type of either a nation state or cybercriminal syndicate will actually be in the platform and committing espionage – economic espionage, political espionage – and take whatever they want because they're in the platform itself.”