Adding Mac support to Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud should open markets for which Kaspersky Enterprise Support for Business was not a good fit.
Kevin Lozeau, director of channel marketing at Kaspersky Lab North America
Support for Macs and a full integration with ConnectWise’s RMM and PSA products are the highlights in Kaspersky Lab’s release of the new version of its Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud.
Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud was introduced last fall, marking the company’s return to the SaaS market in the SMB space.
“It was always the plan to build it out as soon as possible to include the Mac support,” said Kevin Lozeau, director of channel marketing at Kaspersky Lab North America. “We now have a full solution for the core OS platforms.”
While the recent spate of ransomware attacks which have made security even higher profile than before have been focused on vulnerabilities within Windows, not Macs, that doesn’t mean the Mac OS is immune to them.
“The current ransomware attacks haven’t been focused on Macs but that doesn’t mean future ones won’t be,” Lozeau said. In 2016, Kaspersky detected 11.8 million cyber-attacks against Mac users. MacOS-specific malware exists, and Mac users are just as vulnerable to Windows ones from phishing, which is OS-agnostic.
“Mac users tend to be late adopters and lacking in endpoint security generally, even as more and more threats target Mac environments,” Lozeau said. “At the CISO level, they are savvy enough to understand that nothing is bulletproof and that nothing is immune to threats, as that just means that you haven’t been hacked yet. The Mac OS platform is very robust and very secure, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely secure, and one of the biggest vulnerabilities is not securing the systems with basic best practices.”
Lozeau said that Kaspersky was not shut out of mixed environments with Macs previously, because in those environments they would position their Kaspersky Enterprise Support for Business there, since it provides Mac support. He acknowledged though, that this makes them a stronger player in Endpoint Security Cloud’s SMB market.
“We think that at this stage it’s a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘need to have,’ although the market is headed towards the need position,” Lozeau said. “We felt it imperative to have it as part of the overall stack. We weren’t losing opportunities because of the lack of support, although there may have been some where we never got a seat at the table because of it.”
Kaspersky Lab also announced that it recently completed the integration of Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud with ConnectWise’s RMM and PSA platforms ― ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Automate respectively. This comes on the heels of Kaspersky announcing an MSP partner program in January.
“We’ve gone from a beta program to a fully-fledged release program that has been vetted and tested,” Lozeau said. “At the recent ConnectWise Automate event we received overwhelming response from ConnectWise MSPs. It rounds out our solution to MSP partners to provide something we hadn’t been able to address from a management perspective, which was necessary to gain access to more MSP partners.”
Kaspersky also works with Kaseya and Autotask, but the ConnectWise integration is their deepest to date.
“We value our relationships with all our RMM partners, but we did this one first because we had the most demand from partners to add it,” Lozeau said.
This version of Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud also enhances the cloud management console to allow MSPs to assign multiple administrators to manage IT security.
