N-able’s new partnership brings them access to the SentinelOne Vigilance Respond service, which provides their MSPs with EDR and an enterprise SOC on top.
N-able
, which provides its MSP partners with data protection as-a-service, and security solutions on top of their core RMM offerings, has beefed up the security part with the launch of a new N-able Managed Endpoint Detection and Response service, powered by SentinelOne Vigilance Respond. The Managed EDR is based around SentinelOne’s 24×7 SOC and Vigilance security experts.
Managed EDR took a while to get established in the MSP space, where price points were initially an issue. That has faded as prices have come down somewhat and the danger posed by modern threats has become more apparent. But still, only about half of MSPs today offer some kind of EDR offering.
“There is still a wide opportunity in EDR, both for SentinelOne and for us,” said Troels Rasmussen, general manager of security products at N-able.
SentinelOne is very commonly used in the business as a strategic partner, and Rasmussen emphasized that this is because the solution is effective and popular.
“More advanced feature sets is what they provide,” he said. “Most vendors in the space are a resell model. With SentinelOne we can easily integrate the EDR and then can put a managed enterprise-level SOC on top of that.”
This is the first managed EDR offering that N-able has provided its MSPs.
“Managed EDR is net new for us,” Rasmussen stated. “We have security vendor relationships with other vendors but only SentinelOne does managed EDR with us. It’s a complete net new SKU, and we sell a service on top of it.”
Managed EDR supports N-able MSP partners by accelerating the investigation and resolution of threat events detected by EDR, which they typically handle from the start of an incident.
Troels Rasmussen, general manager of security products at N-able
“We provide an initial level of support but for Vigilance, it’s different,” Rasmussen said. “We don’t want to be in the middle if there is an escalation, so the Vigilance team works directly with the MSP, so that we aren’t a bottleneck in the flow.”
SentinelOne Vigilance also monitors endpoints 24×7, and takes immediate mitigation actions, as needed, no matter where you are in the world.
“This level of 24/7/365 support that Vigilance provides is a differentiation,” Rasmussen said. “It’s hard for MSPs to get to that scale.”
Rasmussen stressed that this new service helps to address a security scarcity issue which is not new at all, but which only seems to get worse. The IC 2022 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found that the global security workforce gap increased by 26%, with an additional 3.4 million people really being required to effectively secure businesses.
“We are now seeing a labour shortage, in which staff is hard to hire and retain,” he said. “We help address the labor shortage, even if the MSP has a SOC of their own, and especially if they do not.
Threat hunting on an ongoing basis using EDR’s threat hunting capabilities is also an option for N-able partners who have this advanced feature enabled, to bring in yet another source of security revenue.
“MSPs have to learn how to talk about this and to sell it,” Rasmussen concluded. “Not only is EDR becoming essential for those who want to purchase cybersecurity insurance, but it gives them an opportunity to have a more flexible OPEX profile.”
