Tom Barsi, SVP of corporate and business development at Carbon Black
Today at the Carbon Black Cb Connect customer and partner event in New York City, Carbon Black and managed security service provider Secureworks are announcing an expansion of their long-time partnership. The extended relationship will apply Secureworks Red Cloak behavioral analytics to Carbon Black’s unfiltered data collected by the Cb Predictive Security Cloud.
“Secureworks and Carbon Black have partnered for years,” said Tom Barsi, senior vice president of corporate and business development at Carbon Black. “We blazed the market for a joint EDR product, which Secureworks has continued to leverage.”
Partnerships with key MSSPs are an important part of Carbon Black’s go-to-market strategy.
“Many of our competitors have elected to try and build their own software and services teams and compete with MSSPs,” Barsi said. “We have a different approach. We focus on endpoint security services and empower services organizations out here. We think that’s the winning strategy. The industry lacks specialized security expertise. So we partner on the service provider side. We have absolutely focused on the industry leaders, like Secureworks. Those are the companies our large customers turn to. Secureworks is one of our first and most strategic such partners, and this announcement is an endorsement of their strategic value.”
This new partnerships comes on the heels of Secureworks’ recent decision to decouple their proprietary analytics offering from their endpoint agent, to make the company’s high-fidelity detection and threat hunting capabilities available more broadly in the marketplace to members of the Secureworks Red Cloak Partner Program. This facilitates the two companies exchanging raw data to generate the enhanced telemetry that Secureworks analysts require to apply Red Cloak analytics. Secureworks developed Red Cloak in 2010, and has deployed it broadly since in thousands of response and hunting engagements.
“This was a natural expansion of our relationship,” Barsi said. “It will make us more efficient by applying their Red Cloak threat intelligence to our unfiltered data. It will allow us to respond more quickly. It’s all about automating our SOC and making our service more efficient, and extending what we have been doing for years.”
Chris Bell, director of product management at Secureworks
“We have worked with Carbon Black to increase transparency,” said Chris Bell, director of product management at Secureworks. “With their telemetry, they provide what our watch list is looking for. We have always had a strong two-way relationship, with joint development and joint testing. This latest solution packages some of our key IP with their agent to extend our relationship.”
Carbon Black has their own analytics capability, but has always partnered to buttress this with a more multi-layered approach.
“Our core competency is collecting the unfiltered data,” Barsi said. “We have our own analytics, but it’s all about collective defense. We have always applied third party analytics on top of ours.”
This particularly solution is likely to have the most resonance higher in the market.
“We have had success with our joint solution across the market, from SMBs to the Fortune 100,” Bell said. “We think that this particular one will resonate in the midmarket and up – so fairly high in the market. However, we also see our client base for threat hunting using a managed service for this kind of thing.”
