The Dell One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Passwords offering becomes the first Dell IAM offering to be available to partners out of the gate.

Since Curtis Hutcheson took over as General Manager of Dell Security Solutions last year, he has pursued a Connected Security Strategy designed to bring the unit’s networked security and Identity and Access Management solutions closer together. This entails getting Dell’s large base of SonicWall partners to learn about IAM and cross-sell it to their customers. Dell takes a major step towards that objective today with the release of the Dell One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Passwords.

The new offering blazes a trail in two significant ways, given that Dell IAM solutions have historically been sold to the enterprise, and almost entirely direct. Dell One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Passwords is designed for SMBs. It is also the first IAM solution to be available to channel partners from its initial release.

“This is perfectly positioned for our SonicWALL VAR community because it addresses their type of customer base,” Hutcheson said. “It’s a Global 3000 product brought downmarket and simplified. It’s a great way to introduce it in a straightforward SMB use case. This is also the first time we have taken an identity product and launched it first into the SonicWALL channel.

At last fall’s Peak Performance Event, which is specifically for Dell SonicWALL partners, Dell for the first time brought executives from their higher-end security products to the event, to introduce their offerings to the firewall VARs and explain how they could fit adjacent to a SonicWALL sale. At that point, while the SonicWALL VARs showed interest in privileged account management, few of them were at all familiar with it. This new offering is intended to increase familiarity, through its relative simplicity, while at the same time providing a clearly adjacent sales opportunity — allowing the partners to lock down the privileged passwords associated with the firewalls they sell.

“Privileged Account Management is a very important ingredient in network security as well as total enterprise security, and this is a continuation of the commitment we made at Peak to bring these products through the channel,” Hutcheson said. The pre-hardened appliance — which will soon become the console for managing all Dell IAM solutions — is pre-integrated into a SonicWALL entry level appliance, at a sub-$US10,000 price point.

“I think at this point the SonicWALL partners know this well enough to sell it,”Hutcheson said.  “They see the opportunity. Many VARs control their customers’ firewalls, so they could deploy it internally, or get the customer admins using it as well. We have seen a lot of interest. This and the integrated switch have had the most interest from the VARs. It’s just naturally related to what they do.”

The solution, which is aimed at entry level customers with five admins or less, automates and secures the process of granting admins the credentials they need to perform their duties, and ensures that elevated access to shared and privileged credentials is granted according to established policies. It is all set up through a user-friendly interface.

“Most breaches tend to involve the compromise of privileged accounts,” Hutcheson said  “People realize you have to be dealing strategic in dealing with it them. You don’t want an admin to have the long term keys to the controls. That’s not good for them and it’s not good for the company, especially when these people leave the company.”

Hutcheson said that this is the kind of solution that helps VARs be more strategic to their customers.

“We see it as a natural bolt-on, which also lets the VAR go back to their install base and talk about other areas of security adjacent to this. People will recognize that you don’t want to trust your networking vendor to provide the right security environment.”

The Dell One Identity Safeguard for Privileged Passwords is available now in North America and EMEA.