The new Detector SDS offering is designed to provide MSPs with a sticky, differentiated offering that also can serve as a component of a premium offering for customers.
Michael Mittel, president of RapidFire Tools
Atlanta-based RapidFire Tools has announced a new offering, Detector SDS (Service Delivery System). It takes the technology from their Network Detective Detector IT assessment appliance, and makes it available to MSPs as a high-value internal IT security service sold through an unlimited-use license. Detector SDS also includes a broader bundle of capabilities, which include sales and marketing materials.
“The unlimited use model is not new for us but it is new for the Detector,” said Michael Mittel, president of RapidFire Tools.
RapidFire Tools initially built its business around a series of reporting modules – three relating to IP assessment and two around compliance.
“Over the last year, we built several software appliances, one of which is Detector,” Mittel said. “It uses the same underlying scan tech as the modules but instead of reports, it does email alerts. Now with Detector SDS, we have extended the same unlimited license into the Detector. This is something that really resonates with MSPs.”
Mittel said that MSPs had been selling Detector in a fairly opportunistic way before. With the new Detector SDS service, they will have something with a much broader potential use, and one that will provide valuable differentiation.
“What was happening before was that MSPs were selling Detector when hey sold additional security services to customers,” he stated. “We wanted to do something more aggressive with this. It is designed to give them something that will be stickier with their customers, and provide them with more differentiation.”
Mittel contrasted Detector SDS with the commoditized security services that MSPs typically offer, such as firewall, AV, and spam filtering.
“While these are commoditized and non-sticky, Detector provides a differentiated, high value service,” he said. “It is designed to detect vulnerability and security issues behind the firewall, such as potentially rogue employees accessing inappropriate systems or accessing things at inappropriate times.”
Mittel said that the unlimited license is a very important aspect of what is effectively an end-to-end security delivery system. Detector provides a daily, non-intrusive scan of the entire network, and anything connected to it, looking for anomalous user behaviors or other unexpected changes to the network. After each scan, email alerts can be sent out to whomever the MSP instructs, whether it be their own service team or NOC, or a client.
“Embedded into the email alerts is an interactive email response process flow, which is new,” Mittel said. Dynamic “Action Links” within the alert, tied into the Network Detective cloud-based alert management portal, are used to remediate, investigate, or ignore each issue. The portal learns from flagging, so that issues that are flagged to be ignored will be ignored by the portal, reducing false positives. Over time, the machine learning capability also learns more about the network’s longer-term trends and patterns, as benchmarks to determine normal occurrences.
“Detector SDS has also built-in a complete set of sales and marketing information for the MSP to deliver a cost-effective product that’s priced right and supported properly,” Mittel said.
This includes a pre-configured set of three white-labeled cyber security service plans. Rapidfire has dubbed these Silver, Gold and Platinum, although MSPs can rebrand or even customize them for specific clients, using a menu-driven Service Plan Creator.
“The Service Plan Creator gives the MSP the content they need to sell the service,” Mittel said. “They can set up different levels of security services, and with the push of a button, they can create a document that explains exactly what they provide.”
The Catalogue, another built-in marketing piece, puts the service plans in a booklet. Other marketing collateral built in to the system include brochures, Powerpoints and web texts.
Mittel thinks that this is something that MSPs should be offering to every customer.
“With the pricing on this [a fixed monthly fee of just $499 for unlimited use] this now becomes very affordable for the MSP,” he said. “It will let them close more business with enhanced differentiation, keep more customers, and upsell.”
Mittel also thinks this will interest MSPs who aren’t presently working with RapidFire Tools.
“I think a large number of our existing MSPs will upgrade, given the importance of security today,” he said. “It’s very timely. I also think many MSPs who weren’t interested in our reporting package will be interested in these security services.”
Mittel indicated that RapidFire Tools believes about 20 per cent of MSP clients would be interested in expanding from a base service to a premium service.
“This gives the MSP an upgrade path to sell to this market,” he said. “This is something that will make a huge difference to their bottom line.”
