The Gately Report: Cybersecurity Prominent at CP Expo/MSP Summit
Cybersecurity solutions and services are helping to drive growth in the channel.
![CP Expo hall crowd CP Expo hall crowd](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltded378254afe4316/65f878d76ea185040af3e18c/2024_CP_Expo_Hall_Crowd.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Claire Hart Photography
A cybersecurity deep dive gave attendees an in-depth look at the latest cyber threats, noteworthy statistics and latest solutions.
Kevin McDonald, Alvaka’s COO and CISO, moderated the session. Panelists included:
Scott Barlow, vice president of global MSP and cloud alliances at Sophos.
Melton Littlepage CMO of 1Password.
Ozzie Saeed, founder of IntelliGRC.
“In the Verizon Data Breach Intelligence Report, sort of the bible of threats and successful attacks, 70% of financially impacting business breaches had their origin in a compromised credential,” Littlepage said. “So even though we have very sophisticated tech stacks, and we are guarding the network with zero trust strategies, and we have active threat monitoring and detection, people are not breaking into the network, they're logging in. This is most impactful in the SMB segment. When you think about the broad number of SMBs out there, they exist below the security poverty line. They just can't afford six-figure licenses for enterprise software and so they are the most vulnerable to credential-based attacks, and they suffer the most from it. And when you think about paid out ransoms for ransomware attacks, I would say the vast majority happen in companies with less than 1,000 employees because they're easier to get into.”
Everyone needs to be focused on protecting themselves, McDonald said.
“Part of the problem is everybody thinks or many people think, 'I can't do that; it's just too much,' but if you did the low-hanging fruit, you would literally drop your attack surface by 90%, making you less likely to get attacked,” he said. “So stop worrying about being perfect and just do something, because the cases that I walk into are horrifying, huge companies with just nothing. Management's been told that it's all done, but it's not being done.”
Sophos launched its 2024 threat report, Cybercrime on Main Street, that caters to SMBs, Barlow said.
“The report talks about the 150,000 customer detections that we see annually,” he said. “We have about 20,000 customers on managed detection and response (MDR), and we have close to 600,000 customers globally today. And when you look at the 150,000 detections and the 500 customer threats that were out there, 75% of those were SMB. So one thing that everybody in the room needs is data that you can actually bring to your customers, especially at the SMB level, and say this isn't a scenario where it's not going to happen to you anymore, it's just a matter of time, and that will give you a lot of the statistics.
"One of the other scenarios is last year we did a 2023 threat report, and it explained how the threats were getting in. I think it was over 4,000 customer scenarios and of everybody that was breached or had ransomware, 36% were from known vulnerabilities. So it's very simple that you have to patch your systems, that’s very fundamental. The second was 26% were from credential hacks. The third was phishing. And in this 2024 report, business email compromise (BEC) was the second most popular way to get into an organization. So not only do you need effective cybersecurity, email security, etc., but you need to train your end users as that last line of defense and it ebbs and flows.”
Garrett Gee, Trustwave’s global vice president of indirect channels and alliances, was on hand in the CP Expo Hall to promote his company’s message within the channel.
“We've had a really robust channel for quite some time and a lot of people don't know about it,” he said. "We've been in business for 25 years, but it's been predominantly on the distributor and reseller side. We've had some relationships in the indirect referral arena and so we're here really promoting ourselves within this community.”
Some Trustwave partners have experienced 100% year-over-year growth in the last year, Gee said.
“I think a lot of partners that were thinking about security are now finally leaning in,” he said. “A good example would be going from frame relay or asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) to MPLS. It was scary to partners a decade ago and now partners realize that they need to make that pivot, and start talking about the endpoint and securing the endpoint, not just about deploying actual network infrastructure. So we're getting a lot of really great feedback from the partner community.”
Coro had a major presence in the CP Expo Hall. Dror Liwer, Coro’s founder and CMO, was on hand to talk about his company’s work with partners.
“Most of our revenue comes from the channel,” he said. “We respect the channel, and we wanted to be here and show how much the channel is important to us, which is why this booth is so big and impressive, and which is why we have such a big presence here of so many people. This is our bread and butter.”
Over the last five years, Coro has grown 300% year over year every single year, Liwer said.
“The uniqueness of Coro is that we're the only modular cybersecurity platform in the world, which means our partners can choose which modules they want to use and then grow their portfolio as they try to cover more and more threats on behalf of their customers,” he said. “We don't lock them into something very large and very expensive. Day one they can go in with one module if they want, or one suite if they want, and then grow, which means we give them the ability to offer cybersecurity risk free to them, very little investment on their part, very little investment in training their people because our platform is so easy to use.”
Harvey Mueller, MSP channel sales at Keeper Security, said his company came to CP Expo to “meet with some of the brightest minds around.”
“We have a very unique MSP model so it's really easy for our MSPs to resell us and protect staff internally,” he said. “We offer a really low barrier to entry and a very good margin for resale and everything as well. We're definitely an industry favorite and the most secure password manager out there. So that's kind of our positioning in the market."
Many non-customers in the CP Expo Hall were surprised by Keeper Security’s ease of use and security, Mueller said.
“When you line us up against other password managers, we have very important differentiators in security and certification in particular,” he said. “So we're hearing a lot of, 'Oh, I didn't know Keeper did this.'"
Sxipher was in the CP Expo Hall demonstrating its penetration testing solution.
“We are using deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI) for penetration testing, which is now enabling MSPs and MSSPs to be able to run third-party penetration tests through the use of AI,” said Lisa Bryant, Sxipher’s chief communications officer. “The AI is actually their trusted pen-test partner, so it is empowering them to be able to run their own test as a third party. The reporting can be white-labeled. It can also be branded depending on how they want that to be. They decide the stop, the start, the run and the length of the test themselves.”
Sxipher gives MSPs and MSSPs a view into the network “they would never have had before,” she said.
Bryant said she’s met with over 1,300 MSPs during the past year at conferences.
“They did not realize that we were listening and gaining that information, so the program that we put together matched their needs and what they were asking for,” she said. “So at this point, the feedback has been zero objections, honestly, because we did so much work over the last year and listened to them.”
Cavelo, an attack surface management technology provider, enables MSPs to be MSSPs.
“We've been doing this for over 15 years, said James Mignacca, Cavelo’s president and CEO. “We actually were an MSP so we understand all the moving parts. We have a modular platform and it's turnkey. We tie into their workflow system, whether or not it's Connectwise, ServiceNow, whatever it might be, which is important for MSPs, and the goal is to be able to quickly turn it around into a service offering so that the MSP can make more revenue, and it adds operational efficiency that other enterprise solutions can't offer because we know MSPs need to make more money.”
Exhibiting at CP Expo is how Cavelo gets its name out there, he said.
“This is how we engage with our customers,” Mignacca said. “This is an opportunity for us to actually sit down with our existing MSPs, our existing partners, but obviously, net new partners is the name of the game. It’s all about customer adoption and brand awareness.”
Exhibiting in the CP Expo Hall, Vanta provides automated security and compliance orchestration for MSPs. Its platform continuously scans, identifies, classifies and reports on sensitive data across the organization, simplifying compliance reporting, vulnerability management and risk remediation.
“Say a customer comes up and says, 'Hey, I'm trying to close a deal with this company, but they want us to have Systems and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2), can you help me?'” said Adam Duman, Vanta’s manager of information security compliance. “Not everybody's got a Deloitte consultant in their back pocket. So they can work with Vanta and get a really clear road map of, 'I need to do this, this, this and that,' and really good tracking on progress over time, not to mention references to auditors. Decreased costs across the board makes everybody's life easier. It speeds up deals for customers, and increases revenue and stickiness for MSPs, partners and their customers. And then Vanta can help make the internet safer. Everybody wins.”
SafeAeon offers cybersecurity as a service across the globe to more than 2,500 partners in more than 20 countries.
“Our customers are predominantly MSP and MSSP partners, but we do work with direct end clients as well,” said Amy Kaur, SafeAeon’s director of global sales. “What sets us apart is we offer a very vendor-agnostic approach. It's not a cookie-cutter approach where the same size fits all. We are providing these custom, tailored solutions and it’s very cost-effective as well. MSPs can upsell our services and still be profitable. In the cybersecurity space, the services are very expensive, so we are making sure that any cybersecurity is not out of reach for any business, whether they're small, midsize or large. We are here to support partners across the globe.”
Patch My PC was one of the exhibitors in the MSP Summit Expo Hall, talking to partners about its patch management solution. It automates third-party app management in Microsoft ConfigMgr and Intune, or home PCs.
“We’re just trying to get out there and let everybody know about Patch My PC,” said Wes Mitchell, a customer engineer at Patch My PC. “We started back in 2011 so we’re seeing a lot of growth. Being able to provide this service to customers is very helpful because at the end of the day, you want to make everything more efficient. You want to have somebody that can help you go through that whole process. And that's what we do. I talk to customers all the time, and I can walk them through the entire process. Even from the MSP side of things, they can do the multitenancy to where they can help their customers through the help that we're giving them to do that.”
Alcion, among exhibitors in the MSP Summit Expo Hall, helps MSPs protect their Microsoft 365 tenant data from ransomware, malware and accidental data loss.
“From the safety perspective, we help make sure they protect and back up all their data, but also we help them from a thought leadership perspective,” said Niraj Tolia, Alcion’s CEO. “We help them from a business expansion and customer retention perspective because they can position some of these new things well in the world. And then we also give them these AI tools that make the business more efficient. So there is the business side of the house, the technology side of the house, the thought leadership side of the House, and the multiple ways that we impact our partners today.”
Cynomi, a vCISO platform provider, was among exhibitors in the MSP Summit Expo Hall.
Yoel Platt, vice president of partnerships and business development at Cynomi, said his company enables MSPs to scale up or build a new vCISO service for their SMB customers.
“Cynomi understands that the market has changed dramatically, and the need for strategic guidance is growing from the bottom up, and MSPs are facing a new challenge as to how they scale up, grow and meet that demand,” he said. “Cynomi provides a platform to enable them to delegate responsibilities to less experienced personnel, get engaged with their customer, higher retention, decreased time spent with prospects, but increase their conversion rates, structure their processes, automate them and really scale up their business. And we're all here to make money.”
CyFlare, a security operations center (SOC) as a service, was among exhibitors in the MSP Summit Expo Hall.
“We partner with MSPs or provide services to end users that don't want to build or maintain a SOC of their own,” said Scott Richardson, senior director of systems engineering at CyFlare. “We use extended detection and response (XDR) and endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms to feed information to our security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), and our SOAR is what has the playbooks and the response action capabilities.”
CyFlare came to MSP Summit to develop new partnerships with MSPs and other partners, and meet new customers, he said.
“Sometimes there's alliances that we can find where they have an enhancement to the SOAR platform that we're looking for, so anything here really, " Richardson said.
Also in the MSP Summit Expo Hall, we caught up with Mike Kasprzak, strategic account executive at Cyberleaf, an MSSP.
“We wanted to meet with MSPs and other potential partners to figure out how we can provide best-in-class services to the channel and their end clients,” he said. “We're always looking to get better and that's part of the reason. We want to find the right people to work with, the right people to help us support those folks. We offer comprehensive solutions that are built around the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework in a way where we can deliver security comprehensively and through one platform being Splunk. We can manage the entire network, not just endpoints, not just cloud. We are able to bring everything together and bring all those tools together, and have them work in a coordinated fashion, not just independently of one another.”
Also in the MSP Summit Expo Hall, we caught up with Mike Kasprzak, strategic account executive at Cyberleaf, an MSSP.
“We wanted to meet with MSPs and other potential partners to figure out how we can provide best-in-class services to the channel and their end clients,” he said. “We're always looking to get better and that's part of the reason. We want to find the right people to work with, the right people to help us support those folks. We offer comprehensive solutions that are built around the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework in a way where we can deliver security comprehensively and through one platform being Splunk. We can manage the entire network, not just endpoints, not just cloud. We are able to bring everything together and bring all those tools together, and have them work in a coordinated fashion, not just independently of one another.”
Cybersecurity was everywhere at last week’s massive CP Expo and MSP Summit.
The emphasis on cybersecurity was deliberate as everyone in the channel needs cybersecurity to protect themselves and their customers as cybercriminals continue upping their game.
"Based on our most recent survey of channel partners, 58% of MSP respondents expect to have a double-digit growth year with some expecting breakaway growth,” said Robert DeMarzo, vice president of content for Informa Tech Channels. “Cybersecurity solutions and services are helping to drive much of that growth. For agents and tech advisors, the story is similar with many focusing their sales efforts on helping customers secure their networks. This is driving an insatiable demand for information, training and programs around cybersecurity from the entire channel partner supplier ecosystem."
In addition to more than 8,000 attendees, the CP and MSP Summit Expo Halls were packed with hundreds of vendors and distributors that wanted to strike up conversations with prospective partners. A growing percentage of exhibitors were cybersecurity providers.
This week’s Gately Report includes a roundup of cybersecurity-related activities at CP Expo and MSP Summit.
Scroll through our slideshow above for highlights.
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