XDR is the most recent offering within Jolera’s portfolio of turnkey managed services they make available to their MSP partners.
Sagar Vyas, Vice President, Cybersecurity and Integration Services at Jolera
Jolera, a provider of turnkey solutions for the MSP market with offices in Toronto and in Porto, Portugal, rounded out their cybersecurity portfolio last fall with the introduction of a new XDR service, which is typically sold as part of a stack with other cybersecurity offerings. The company emphasizes that both the technology and their customer support gives their MSP partners a competitive advantage in the market.
Jolera has an interesting history, in that they originally started out themselves as an MSP in 2001. Then, in 2017, the company made a bold pivot to their business model to focus on providing MSPs with services.
“They didn’t think that the margins for the MSP business as it existed then would be there over time,” said Paolo Del Nibletto, Jolera’s Chief of Channel Business. “Many MSPs didn’t have a full roster of solutions. We have designed a full roster of turnkey solutions, which we allow the MSPs to take to market themselves. We have developed multiple fixed cost-per-service solutions of this type, of which the latest one is XDR.”
While there are smaller MSP-focused companies that provide channel partners with certain types of services, Jolera offers a broad selection of them. They have a portfolio of Backup and Recovery solutions, a portfolio of Help Desk and Field Services offerings, a portfolio of 24/7/365 IT Management and Monitoring services for both endpoints and infrastructure workloads, a Professional Services and Consulting portfolio, and a portfolio of cloud services covering management and maintenance of infrastructure workloads on both private and public clouds. Last, and certainly not least, is their Secure IT cybersecurity solutions portfolio, which includes their XDR offering that was rolled out last fall.
Jolera considered their major competitor to be Continuum, which offered a similar package of services, until they were acquired by ConnectWise. Many large telcos also offer similar portfolios of services, although other telcos are effectively Jolera partners.
“Many of these telcos white list us, and in addition to our many MSP partners we also have other partner types, such as printer companies who don’t do print services,” said Sagar Vyas, Vice President, Cybersecurity and Integration Services at Jolera. Jolera’s Go-to-Market is almost entirely channel, although they have a small number of legacy customers who date from the days when Jolera was itself an MSP.
The addition of the XDR capability to the existing cybersecurity solutions around EDR, email security, cybersecurity awareness, firewall and Wi-Fi protection extends Jolera’s general philosophy, and also takes it to another level, Vyas said.
“This is a much more cost effective use into our managed security offerings,” he stated. “We only deal with channel partners and best of breed technologies, and the MSP doesn’t have to assume the risk that comes from these managed investments.”
All of the Jolera security tools come from partnership with other vendors. EDR, for example, is powered by SentinelOne, while their vulnerability management comes from Qualys. Their XDR comes from Elastic.
“There is no standard definition of XDR today,” Vyas said. “We integrate multiple solutions into our protection. A major advantage of Elastic is that they are the world’s fastest search provider. A major problem with other SIEMs is that they are large, clunky and slow. When we built our XDR it was very much purpose built, particularly among companies who wanted to qualify for cyberinsurance. We wanted to create a single SKU, and we wanted to emphasize response with an outcome-based solution. This is why we chose Elastic, We also used machine learning to unify customer patterns based on logins, and use that for anomaly discussion. That reduces false positives, and has made us more competitive in the space.”
Vyas emphasized that this is consistent with Jolera’s approach to customer service.
“For years, we used to sell signature-based anti-virus, but when we launched our EDR offering we converted these customers for free,” he said. “Because we do such a large volume, we didn’t focus on the product, but on the service behind it. Otherwise, we would just sell licenses for EDR. Until recently, you had to spend a lot of money on SIEMs and SOCs. That model has now changed significantly, and we came up with a model based on a decade of experience that allows us to pass savings on to the customer.”
Vyas concluded this is the only way a provider of services for the MSP market can realistically approach that market today.
“We saw this need in the marketplace,” he stressed. “The only way to be effective is with a service that covers everything. That drove us to start pivoting, to integrate tools into a reasonably priced XDR offering which can include one or more of EDR, MDR, VDR, all backed up by our 24/7 support.”
