SonicWall had an EDR solution before, which is now part of the MDR solution, with the MDR coming primarily through the acquisition three months ago of MMSP solutions provider Solutions Granted Inc
Chandrodaya Prasad, Executive Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, SonicWall
Cybersecurity vendor SonicWall has announced their first MDR solution specifically tailored for their MSP customers. It adds new security vendors’ managed services to the SonicWall platform, and builds on two recent acquisitions by the company.
“While we had an EDR solution, we did not have an MDR solution at all before this,” said Chandrodaya Prasad, Executive Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, who has been at SonicWall a year after spending much of his career at Cisco. “We announced the acquisition of Solutions Granted Inc [SGI], a highly rated Master MSP, and that closed three months ago. We then began enhancing solutions that they already offered.”
The two companies have a long relationship. SGI had been a SonicWall customer for almost 15 years.
The other recent acquisition was Banyan Security, which provides security service edge (SSE) and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) solutions, is also related to the new MDR platform, as it will lead to additional managed services to help them secure their cloud environments.
SonicWall is adding endpoint vendors to its MDR solution as part of this co-managed security service. Out of the gate, the support anti-virus tools include Capture Client, SonicWall’s own advanced EDR solution, Windows Defender, SentinelOne, and Cylance.
“Right now, these are the ones that we are working with,” Prasad said. “There’s no single entity that owns the entire cybersecurity expertise. Customers want us to work with other guys, so adding them to our platform will only continue.” It will include all things managed from firewalls to cloud security as the SonicWall platform expands.
Prasad indicated that this new initiative came from CEO and President Bob VanKirk and his leadership team.
“They wanted to talk less and listen more to end customers and partners, and the feedback from partners here was consistent,” he said. “They wanted solutions to protect on the spot as part of a full suite. They also wanted improved detection and response, and cloud security, which was a major reason for our Banyan acquisition two months ago.”
Prasad said that while he had been in enterprise for most of his career, enterprise customers and MSP customers both share a common fact that they are overwhelmed by the number of tools.
“That number of tools is close to 50 or 60,” he stated. “As we speak to more partners about the increasing cost of CAPEX and OPEX and make sure they are shared across all points, we are finding that it’s becoming a nightmare for them to solve. Now, they want one vendor providing 60-70% of their stack, with good integration of other tools to provide the rest. We make sure that they operate well and integrate well as a solution. Five years ago, most customers preferred best of breed. but now they want best of suite.”
SonicWall sells to both the SMB and the enterprise, although most of it is SMB and midmarket, and that will apply to the MDR as well.
“The target segment is mainly SMB, midmarket and commercial, which have little in-house security of their own,” Prasad indicated. 70-75% of our customers that are partner-served are SMB, midmarket and commercial.” The latter two are basically the same thing.
“A lot of enterprises are relying more on partners, but for us, at least in the short and mid term we are concentrated on the SMB with our MDR,” he added. “The enterprise is not the immediate focus there for us.”
