The new product has been rebranded as SolarWinds ARM, which may confuse some who think SolarWinds has gone into chip-making, but the company is emphasizing that in addition to being a simple tool to manage internal user access, it is also extremely inexpensive compared to the market. It will be sold through SolarWinds MSP as well.
The risk assessment dashboard (pre-rebranding) in what will be SolarWinds ARM
SolarWinds has announced the launch of SolarWinds ARM a new offering based on their acquisition of Berlin-based 8MAN. The acquisition was made earlier this fall, and the technology has been available to the SolarWinds community for a month, but the acquisition, and the new brand, were announced today.
The company’s registered name is Protected Networks GmbH, but 8MAN is the brand they used, and which the market knows them by.
“We are starting to make a much bigger presence in security, starting with the acquisition of Trusted Metrics earlier this year,” said Jim Hansen VP Products, Security, SolarWinds. “With our security portfolio, we are in a position to do there what we have already done for IT operations. We can do the same thing in the security market. I’m super excited about having 8MAN because it will help us do that.”
Hansen emphasized that 8MAN, now SolarWinds ARM, is highly complementary to SolarWinds’ offerings.
“This fits in nicely with our portfolio, and help us solve security challenges,” he said. “We strive to be simple to use and cost effective, and this is something that we could pretty much turnkey it for our customers and our partners.”
Access Rights Management is about centrally provisioning, deprovisioning, managing, and auditing user access rights to their systems, data, and files, particularly against threats from within an organization rather than outside it.
Jim Hansen VP Products, Security, SolarWinds
“It differs from something like Privilege Account Management, which is mostly around how you manage passwords,” Hansen said. “Access Rights Management is around files and permissions around them, particularly involving permissions to servers around SharePoint, Exchange or Active Directory itself. It lets the admin control manage and audit all resources, and is more comprehensive in management than Active Directory.”
SolarWinds already has multiple products that protect against external threats, which cover threat monitoring, patch management, email management, and security and event management.
“8MAN extends the portfolio beyond those basic hygiene types of things to focus on more advanced security tools for user access rights,” Hansen said. “It also provides these tools at a very cost-effective level.”
Hansen said that when they were looking for an access rights management provider to acquire, they did a lot of due diligence.
“We did look at most of them,” he indicated. “There were a few things that we loved about them. First, in North America, no one knows who they are. They primarily sold in the DACH [Germany, Austria, Switzerland] region, where they were the number one vendor. They did some business in the U.K., and were just in the midst of expanding into North America when they were acquired. We also loved the technology itself. When we look to bring new products to market, we want them to work in the same model we use, where the products have to be easy to use. We want customers to be able to download it, try it, get it running quick and see value quickly. The product can be rapidly installed and configured, so they were a perfect fit for us.”
8MAN sold through a hybrid go-to-market channel, which included both on-prem partners and MSPs.
“With their MSP partners, in some cases they resold the product and in others delivered it as a service,” Hansen said. “It is absolutely our intention to make this available to SolarWinds MSP.”
Partners should be excited about this acquisition, Hansen indicated.
“With all the challenges of keeping control of user access, it is very difficult to put order around that chaos, when you have to undo access,” he said. “It’s a crazy amount of work. In the short time we have had this, customers have said this has been a huge problem for us which this addresses. Our internal IT uses it ourselves for our thousands of users at SolarWinds. It’s a solution for problem that every company has.”
The cost of SolarWinds ARM relative to competitive offers is another major asset.
“It’s ridiculously inexpensive,” Hansen stated. “Other solutions in this area are three to five times as expensive as this – and this has the same features. Most organizations in the midmarket and SMB don’t buy these solutions because they are so expensive. But because of that low price point, it’s super affordable for all organizations to acquire this technology.”
