Tech Data has changed the direction of its Recon security offerings, expanding it to a suite of seven outsourced security services, and transforming it into a new route for security startups to reach a broader channel community.

Recon originally debuts almost two years ago under Avnet Technology Solutions per-merger. It served as an outsourced security operations centre (SOC) offered to solution providers in both the U.S. and Canada. But Alex Ryals, vice president of security solutions for Tech Data, said he saw an opportunity in the startup-rich security sector to bring in a slew of new services from vendors who are today too small to catch the eye of the channel through distribution.

“This is about bringing to market some new names with niche offerings,” Ryals said of the suite. “These are all solutions my partners have asked me about.”

Members of the Recon Suite now include:

• Recon SOC – the rebranded original member of the Recon family – security monitoring and management through an outsourced security operations centre;
• Recon Policy – a library of over 200 security policy documents that a partner can access to build policies for their customers, or in the case of an MSP or other service providers, craft their own;
• Recon Priority – a software tool that helps solution providers identify which patches are the most critical to apply for their customers based on not only the vulnerabilities that are in the wild, but the exploits based on them;
• Recon Risk – a tool that helps solution providers more closely define “the cost of doing nothing” in terms of a number of types of security risks their clients may have;
• Recon ProServ – a catalogue of security professional services offerings from the Tech Data team;
• Recon Radar – a tool for scanning Bluetooth and WiFi networks that helps find any rogue devices on a customer’s network; and
• Recon Restore – bringing together a number of backup and restore vendors to offer a package that can both offer realtime restore during an attack, and whole-system recovery after an attack.

With the exception of ProServ, all of the services are offered by third-party vendors, including companies like Security Colony, Arch Nimbus, Pony Express, Veeam, Veritas, and Unitrends. Ryals said he’s not hiding the vendors behind each offering in any way, making it clear to solution providers with whom they’re working if they start selling Recon services.

In fact, Ryals said he sees the potential for Recon to become a springboard of sorts into a broader, standalone presence in distribution. The distributor plans to introduce “two or three” new services per quarter on a regular basis, and at the same time, there’s a chance that some existing services will, over time, “graduate” out of Recon.

“The criteria aren’t set, and it will be on a vendor by vendor basis, but I’d like to see some of these vendors graduate out of Recon if we start driving enough business,” Ryals said. “I spend a good bit of my time on who’s going to be the next Palo Alto Networks-type breakout, and I’m placing my bets on some clever, cool solutions.”

Putting the solutions under the Recon brand makes them instantly familiar to many security-minded solution providers, many of whom have bee dealing with the original Recon SOC offering for some time now, and many of whom have found success with that offering — particularly as the cost for security professionals has continued to climb in the face of an industry-wide shortage. The cost of, and the inability to find, security managers makes offering an outsources 24/7 offering quite attractive to SMBs and even some enterprise customers. In fact, Ryals said that partner who have offered a 30-day free trial of the SOC service to their customers have closed the business about 80 per cent of the time.

Again with the exception of the professional services, the Recon services are available on a subscription basis — some for solution providers to resell, and some for solution providers to consume themselves.

Ryals said the next step for many of these services is to more fully integrate the Recon services with the distributor’s StreamOne cloud services offering.