Ontinue Extends Managed Security Services to IoT/OT EnvironmentsOntinue Extends Managed Security Services to IoT/OT Environments

Ontinue has expanded its managed security services to help chief information security officers (CISOs) protect internet-of-things/operational technology (IoT/OT) environments.

ION for IoT Security uses Microsoft Defender for IoT to inventory IoT and OT environments. It also collects telemetry and generates security alerts. The ION managed extended detection and response (MXDR) and ION for IoT Security services offer centralized managed security operations for IT and OT environments, all delivered via the combination of the ION SecOps platform, Ontinue’s around-the-clock cyber defense center and designated cybersecurity advisors. 

Alex Berger, Ontinue’s vice president of product marketing and marketing communications, said businesses in numerous vertical markets continue to adopt IoT and OT is heavily used in manufacturing.

“What we're also experiencing is a shift in the responsibility model within those organizations where CISOs are increasingly being made accountable for the security of these systems,” he said. “Traditionally they were ... siloed and kept separately. And as CISOs become more and more responsible for securing these systems, they need to fold those systems into their existing security postures. That's why we produced our service. The opportunity for our partners lies in education and deployment, and strategy.”

Related:Ontinue Launches First Partner Program After Split from Open Systems

Helping CISOs with Managed Security Services

Many CISOs don’t know where to start when securing an OT or IoT environment, Berger said. That's where Ontinue's managed security services can help.

“These are new frontiers, new domains for many of them,” he said. “We've had situations where we sit down to discuss how best to secure the customer’s OT environment, and it's the first time that the security team and the OT team are actually meeting in the customer's environment. They're only just meeting for the first time when we come into the picture."

As an MSSP, Ontinue's expertise lies in operationalizing its customers technology and the security controls.

"We lean very heavily on our partners to help educate and put that technology in place to begin with. For anybody who is doing security strategy, technology strategy, advising on which technologies to go with and why, or helping with the implementation efforts of IoT or OT security controls, that is exactly where we would love to team up and partner.”

Channel Futures:  The role of CISO has evolved from what it used to be not long ago. How is Ontinue helping with that evolution?

Alex Berger: As a managed security provider, our job is to be consultative. We are very much a partner to our customers, not just the vendor. And embedded within that is helping CISOs navigate the changes that are taking place, both in terms of the attack surface and in terms of the pressure that they're receiving from boards and other executives.

There's often a very reactionary attitude in the zeitgeist toward new threats, new attack surfaces, the latest media craze, what have you. It's not necessarily undeserved. That reactionary attitude makes sense. Sometimes these things are really time sensitive, they're really dangerous. They're things that have to be jumped all over. But helping CISOs understand where to focus their attention, where to place their bets, where to spend their money and where to focus their team's attention and time is something that Ontinue is well suited to being able to help with, and something that we've actually built into the nature of our our managed detection and response (MDR) service.

The service comes with an advisory capacity that is there to help not only fine-tune controls and harden the security posture, but actually plan for the future and improve security maturity as a program overall within our customers' environments. That includes taking on new attack surfaces like OT that are all of a sudden falling into the purview of the CISO, or addressing completely new concerns, like, how do we want to start thinking about AI security, securing AI environments and things like that? All of this falls into the realm of what we help advise our CISOs and their teams on.

CF: Gartner named Ontinue a "Strong Performer" in its Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for MDR. What does that mean for Ontinue and its partners?

AB: We're absolutely thrilled by this. Gartner Peer Insights is a very powerful tool for both Gartner and non-Gartner customers to get a sense for the vendor landscape and understand who's out there for whatever it is they're looking for. It's nice that non-Gartner customers can actually access Peer Insights and review it as well. It's not limited to Gartner customers.

Our presence in that is a very organic representation of our customers' faith in us. We had the second-highest willingness to recommend percentage of any of the vendors in the entire report, which we're really proud of. I think it speaks volumes about the work we're doing, and the way that our customers react to and appreciate that work.

Gartner recently named Ontinue a "Strong Performer" in its Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for MDR. Titima Ongkantong/Shutterstock

When it comes to our partners, we don't partner with absolutely everybody. We partner with like-minded organizations that have the same sort of approach and goals. The reality is that managed services [is] a trust business; trust is everything. The fact that our customers trust us means everything to us. They need to trust our partners, our partners need to trust us and we need to trust our partners. It needs to be a symbiotic, productive relationship in that way. The Voice of the Customer is just a good representation of the quality of the trust that we've built with our customers and with our partners.

CF: How is the evolving threat landscape shaping Ontinue’s business, channel and product strategies?

AB: There are two dimensions that we're always balancing. There's the threat landscape and the actual threats that are being generated and propagated, and leveraged, and then there's the attack surface, which is what those threats are actually targeting. That's also expanding.

Ontinue was founded on the basis of the philosophy that the rapid evolution of threats and the ever increasing nature of the attack surface are problems that, no matter how many people we throw at them and no matter how much automation we throw at them, there's always going to be a challenge. We're always going to be behind. We have to find a way to overcome this, so both of these dimensions were integral to our approach, which was to home in on a set of controls that could be ubiquitous and cover the widest amount of attack surface with the least amount of overhead in terms of management and operations.

That gets us to the next point, which is, we need to be able to automate and collaborate with our customers in a way that maximizes the use of those tools, so key to that automation piece was going to be AI. We knew that humans were never going to be able to keep up, so using AI to go beyond deterministic automation, augmenting human capacity with automation, but also becoming predictive [to] allow the automation to make some decisions, particularly when it comes to proposing automation workflows for net new scenarios. That's where we're starting to use agentic AI to do some of these things.

The last piece is collaboration is everything. No matter what happens from a threat perspective, we need to be able to collaborate in real time with our customers very efficiently and effectively, and show up where they are, which really informs our whole collaboration model. Our entire service is run through Microsoft Teams ... to facilitate rapid communication and tailor our service to the customer in the communication and collaboration tools that they use. That's where we show up. The reason that matters is when you're dealing with net-new threats and things you've never seen before, we have to be in constant contact. We do everything we can to take the investigation, even the response as far as we can, and we have a lot of mechanisms in place to do more on the customer's behalf than the average MDR vendor. There's nothing that will ever replace that human interaction. That's a tenant that we ascribe to, that really informs everything we build.

CF: What’s the latest in terms of Ontinue’s partner program? Anything new coming for partners?

AB: We maintain a smaller number of what I would call very high value-add, symbiotic relationships. They're designed to drive sustainable and complementary growth. That's what we're looking to achieve. What we look for in a partner is their unique expertise and the complementary expertise, the differentiated service that they can provide that's going to augment what we're doing. The Ontinue Partner Program really maximizes the growth and increases the mutual revenues between both of us.

As far as the program's expansion or where the program stands, we are focused right now on continuing to find and align with partners that achieve those ends. Those could be partners that are going to help us on the strategy and deployment of the Microsoft technology suite, and getting that into the hands of customers so that we can then use that to manage ongoingly. But it could also be complementary security partners. We work with incident response (IR) partners who take what we do from a security perspective and, in the event of an incident, can provide last-mile support around forensics and some of the more niche IR functions that are required. And, of course, we work with lots of threat intelligence partners as well on that side of the equation. There are a few different avenues through which we work with partners, and we're always open to new and fruitful relationships.

CF: Is Ontinue growing financially? If so, what role are partners playing in that growth?

AB: Very much so. We’ve had a fantastic couple of years since we launched the brand after spinning out of our legacy company, Open Systems, and we've been growing rapidly, adding lots of new [customers] and retaining our existing business, which for us is imperative. Partners are a very valuable source of leads and opportunities.

A lot of times when we show up to an account, if the customer isn't quite mature enough with their Microsoft deployment to jump straight into MDR with us, we will often tap one of our partners to come in and help bring that deployment to the right level of maturity so that we can operationalize the technology on an ongoing, 24/7 basis and make the customer successful. We would not be able to achieve the performance that we have as a company without our partners.

CF: Is Ontinue’s partner ecosystem growing? If so, what’s fueling that growth and is Ontinue focused on specific types of partners?

AB: The partner ecosystem is growing. We take a very tactical approach to the way we bring on new partners. We have our channel leads inside the company who are constantly sourcing new relationships for us. We get a lot of inbound requests and we are a little bit picky. That's partially because of our size, we can only maintain so many relationships effectively, and we very much believe that we won't degrade quality for quantity.

A lot of the growth is organic in nature. For example, we're picking up momentum in a given region. All of a sudden we're finding customers who work with our existing partners, or we tap into a resource that we have in that region already and team up to go after the region together. It really depends on the technology side, of course. That's largely driven by our product management team and our security teams, our threat intelligence team, and some of the other security outfits within the organization in terms of what technologies we need to bring into play and which companies would be best-suited to help us do that. That's an ever-evolving process as well, fueled organically by the needs of the customer.

Ultimately, from our perspective, everything comes back around to what our customers need to be successful, and then who we can work with to achieve that success.

CF: What's the latest in terms of partner feedback?

AB: The biggest one is probably capacity. Sometimes we receive more than we can necessarily handle, or they want us to engage with more than we can necessarily handle, which is a good problem to have, obviously. Our partner community is constantly giving us feedback on better ways to engage. Ultimately, our partners don't necessarily feed our product directly, so they don't necessarily provide us with feedback on the product itself.

Partner feedback contributed to what Ontinue is doing today in the IoT/OT realm. IoTMooam/Shutterstock

We do occasionally get expansion feedback. For instance, OT and IoT are a perfect example. One of the things that was driving our understanding of the need for this in the market was the partner community coming to us and saying, "Hey, what can you guys do for OT and IoT?" We've got customers who are starting to think about deploying this stuff and they're looking for MDR support. "Can you guys help us?" They are a very valuable source of feedback to our product management team to strategically figure out what to build next, and we take that very seriously.

CF: What can partners expect from Ontinue the rest of 2025?

AB: Growth and scale. You're going to see a lot more of us. You're going to start seeing an expansion of our services beyond just OT. OT/IoT security was just the first. We've got more slated for the year, which unfortunately I can't divulge quite yet, but soon. More expansion of services on our core MXDR platform and service, which will, of course, create more opportunity for us to partner and find new avenues to help our customers, and hopefully generate some good professional services work for our partners out there and also some consultative services as well. That's a big one.

You'll see us also scale in the regions where we operate. So DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), the United Kingdom and Ireland, and North America as well. We're investing heavily in those regions from an expansion perspective. And the product will continue to evolve and expand.