BlackBerry sees providing the CEM functionality that the broad IT market wants as an option within their managed XDR service as a major differentiating factor for their partners compared to other cybersecurity vendors.
Nathan Jenniges, Vice President of Products for the Cybersecurity Business at BlackBerry
BlackBerry has announced the integration of their subscription-based 24×7 Managed Extended Detection and Response (XDR) CylanceGUARD service with their BlackBerry AtHoc Critical Event Management (CEM) software. It provides an optional new SKU for the XDR service that enables secure multi-channel communications from within the CylanceGUARD platform itself.
The integration of these solutions is one of the projects launched by Nathan Jenniges, Vice President of Products for the Cybersecurity Business at BlackBerry, who joined BlackBerry in January 2022.
“The idea behind bringing me in was to bring a fresh pair of eyes to the portfolio,” Jenniges said. “The actual CylanceGUARD offering was new. We had an XDR service before, but it was an outsourced third party one, and we brought it in house in April last year. At that time, we also branded it around Cylance, whereas previously it had been branded BlackBerry.”
The integration of CylanceGUARD and AtHoc was a natural extension of this.
“I talked to hundreds of CIOs and CISOs in the last year, and they told me they saw a key problem developing,” Jenniges indicated. “Their threat research teams were reporting incidents where the threats were visibly watching, where before they just hid. This is a unique time we are in with cyberattacks. The attackers are no longer trying to stay hidden. This greatly increases the need for communication, around ‘what do you do IF.’ They have to have a plan.”
Jenniges said that the AtHoc integration makes such a plan practical.
“With AtHoc, we have the best critical event management capability in the world,” he said. “What if we brought it into the CylanceGUARD dashboard and integrated it into our workflows?
“We did a demo at a CISO forum in New York and the room was very excited,” Jenniges continued. “Now we have productized it. The plan was to integrate it within all our capabilities in the course of the year, to provide a path where you can communicate completely out of band and fill a critical need in the market.” Through CylanceGUARD, users can quickly activate incident response plans for impacting situations, capture real-time information, and rapidly deploy secure communication to specified groups.
BlackBerry AtHoc has traditionally been sold to large players, particularly in government. It is used by over 75% of U.S. federal government employees for crisis communications and incident response. Jenniges said that most IT users don’t need the more advanced capabilities that AtHoc provides to its traditional customer base, but the idea behind this integration is to provide other users only the functionality that they do need.
“The AtHoc product has typically been used at large scale inside governments, and in other large institutions,” Jenniges noted. “The IT and security world doesn’t need most of its capabilities at all. We are just integrating the capabilities that IT needs. We see this as a unique asset we have that will differentiate us from every other cybersecurity product. This is not the kind of integration where you have to buy AtHoc. You get the functionality you need as a tier in CylanceGUARD if you elect that option.”
BlackBerry is expressing that they are seeing very broad demand for this from their CylanceGUARD base.
“We interviewed 20 CylanceGUARD customers – from small to the largest,” Jenniges said. “They all wanted it.”
While the AtHoc channel has been fairly specialized, this new offering will be available to the broad range of partners who sell Cylance XDR.
“It will be for the full channel – every channel partner that can sell the service offering,” Jenniges stated. “It’s a great opportunity. This gives our partners an opportunity to go to a customer base that exists already, and it gives them a unique differentiator.”
CylanceGUARD with BlackBerry AtHoc CEM integration will be available to new and existing CylanceGUARD customers starting May 2023.
