ESET makes major enhancements to their ESET PROTECT platform and professional services offerings

ESET Inspect Cloud, a rebranding of their ESET Enterprise Inspector solution makes it available in the cloud for the first time as well as on prem, as ESET’s customer base, which had a high on-prem bias until recently, is asking for more cloud options.

Michal Jankech, Global VP of SMB and MSP Segment at ESET

ESET, a global cybersecurity vendor that is headquartered in Slovakia, has announced a major refresh of their ESET platform. It is essentially the 9.0 of the offering, although it only acquired their name with the 8.0 version. The platform, which is the primary interface for managing ESET, has had multiple tweaks, with the most interesting likely being the rebranding of ESET Enterprise Inspector to Inspect Cloud, and its availability for the first time as a cloud product.

“ESET PROTECT itself is a new name introduced a year ago for something older, particularly two products, Administrator, which is for Management, and our EDR products,” said  Michal Jankech, Global VP of SMB and MSP Segment at ESET. “So it is more of an evolution than a revolution. What used to be a management product for endpoint problems is now an XDR platform.”

Jankech said that-the changes are consistent with ESET’s consistent upgrade of its portfolio.

“We are a long term-player in the market, with more than 30 years of continued growth, during which we have continuously innovated our product,” he said. “We have a very nice combination of years of human expertise, and new technologies, as well as cloud and machine learning capabilities.”

While the market itself and ESET’s product portfolio have both changed significantly, ESET still goes after the same core markets.

“We are still SMB and mid-market,focused and 100% of our business goes through partners,” Jankech said.”The majority of our customers are 500 seat companies or less.”

The ESET PROTECT platform enhancements include an auto-update mechanism to ensure that all ESET Endpoint agents and implemented solutions are always up to date. ESET PROTECT also now offers a dashboard for ESET LiveGuard Advanced, an advanced threat defense solution that includes cloud sandboxing.

An in-depth integration of ESET Inspect Cloud and the ESET PROTECT platform allows for a much smoother experience, with sleeker dashboards and more streamlined deployments. ESET Inspect Cloud is a rebranding of their ESET Enterprise Inspector EDR solution. While it remains available on-prem, this is the first time that the solution has been available as a cloud offering. That might seem odd, but Jankech said that there is a good reason for it.

“Newer endpoint companies like Crowdstrike could build in the cloud from the start because they started later and with a different customer base that expected them to do different things,” he pointed out. “Now, because the solution remains available on-prem as well as in the cloud, we provide freedom of choice.”

ESET also announced an enhancement to their ESET Professional Services, which are aimed at enterprise-sized businesses that have more than 1,000 employees but who lack the internal expertise to provide optimal protection and complement the various updates to ESET’s business security software solutions. Now the services will also be available through distributors.

“ESET Professional Services are not new, but the packaging details are,” Jankech said. “We have delivered them for some time. Now we have consolidated them and created a service offering which allow the distributors to deliver services once they are certified on them. They will handle the Tier One and Tier Two Services, while ESET will handle the Tier 3.”

Jankech also emphasized that as a Slovak company, even as ESET continues to grow, it won’t be moving outward as it moves upwards.

“ESET is really stable and are here to stay,” he said. “We are building our own campus here to attract more committed people. We have grown up here and we don’t want to change that.”