Sumo Logic extends multi-tenancy to customer-facing for MSP, MSSP and MDR partners

Sumo Organizations will extend partners’ visibility and give them new capabilities by letting them analyze the data of all their customers together.

Sumo Organizations

Redwood City CA-based Sumo Logic, whose machine data-based platform provides insights and intelligence about applications that the company refers to as continuous intelligence, has extended its ease of use to partners who provide different types of managed services to their customers. They have announced Sumo Organizations, a new multi-account management solution that adds customer facing multi-tenancy to the infrastructure multi-tenancy which existed previously. This lets partners like MSPs, MSSPs and MDRs increase visibility and control of observability and security intelligence, and do things through the Sumo Logic UI that previously could be done, but which required the use of API integrations.

“We have been investing in our service provider channel for years, and we have some great MSPs and MSSPs,” said Michael Marfise, VP and GM of Growth and Portfolio Planning at Sumo Logic. “One of their biggest challenges is that while we have been multi-tenanted at the infrastructure level, service providers need the ability to have cross-customer visibility at the customer-facing level. They want to buy once from Sumo and spend data flexibility across the customer base. They need to manage Sumo like we manage Sumo, with on their own start trials for their customer provision, and manage them in one seamless interface, and in the SIEM space have visibility of ALL threats in one place. So we have added customer facing multitenancy with Sumo Organizations.”

Sumo Organizations lets partners, as well as enterprise customers seeking to use multi-tenancy for the same purpose, monitor and manage operational and security intelligence, at scale, across multiple customer accounts. It also makes it easy for teams to gain visibility and troubleshoot application issues and security risks across their entire business.

“That’s why we made this big investment, to make it easier for partners to provide provisioning, data visibility and cost management,” Marfise said. “We have been giving these capabilities with APIs for a while, but doing it through our UI with Sumo Organizations makes it much easier for them.

Marfise explained how an MDR provider like eSentire can derive significant value from the new solution.

Michael Marfise, VP and GM of Growth and Portfolio Planning at Sumo Logic

“For someone like eSentire, it comes down to time to value,” he said. “They manage hundreds of different customers through Sumo. They don’t have to reach out to us now to set up a customer, or to do a trial. They can now control how credits are being handled very easily across their customer base. And when you get into MDR use cases, they can now easily look at sites and aggregate across all products.”

Marfise said the tricky part in putting this together was to put the right security rights in place to let partners take control.

“We had to be very calculated to provide the right capabilities and security protections and control to make sure it wasn’t abused,” he said.

The old process of partners referring things to Sumo wasn’t really a drain on Sumo, because the process was automated, but that changed a year ago when they moved to a credits model.

“There was definitely a manual process there, with back office financial jiggering for reallocation of credits, and this will benefit us there,” Marfise noted.

Marfise said that while dollar savings from the solution will vary from customer to customer, it is still a foundational solution.

“Partners who use this say that it’s a game changer for them from a time savings perspective,” he stated. “Now that they have the foundation in place to provide these management capabilities, the next step is limitless, so they can gain insights into the business problems. It’s especially important on the security side. Tying this into our cloud SIEM product is very strategic for our MSP and MDR partners.”

Marfise said that the new capability will also give partners new revenue opportunities.

“It’s all about visibility,” he stated. “The cloud SIEM uses intelligence, which can now be aggregated across customers to look for trends, Partners can now start to look for other things to do further. There are further insights that can be gleaned by looking at all customers in totality.”