Secure Out of Band Collaboration is a relatively new technology, and ArmorText believes it will appeal to multiple partner types, including resellers, GSIs and MSPs.
Navroop Mitter, ArmorText’s CEO
McLean VA-based security vendor ArmorText has launched their Partner Enablement Program, which allows their partners to build additional value-added services within ArmorText’s Secure Out of Band Collaboration environment. The program is targeted at Managed Security Services Providers [MSSPs], Global Systems Integrators (GSIs), law firms, and Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) Retainer Services providers.
ArmorText’s Secure Out of Band Collaboration technology is a rethinking and enhancement of older solutions that have been around for years to provide secure communications in the event of a cyberattack.
“The older solutions were massive alert systems, and those have existed for a long time,” said Navroop Mitter, ArmorText’s CEO. “So have internal chat solutions, which moved to the cloud, like Microsoft Communicator and Cisco Jabber. What those did was exacerbated conditions when they were hosting chat solutions.”
ArmorText has been available to enterprises since 2015. While we’ve long focused on incident response, security operations, and threat intelligence sharing, as the market has matured, we’ve come to call secure communications designed for these use cases, Secure Out of Collaboration since at least 2021, ” Mitter indicated. “Since rolling out our first secure communications capabilities, we have expanded into a large chunk of the utility network and 80% of US households get their household power from our customers. Our many utility customers include the largest public and private power companies as well as small rural ones, and we also work with oil and gas, law firms, banks, telecoms, and others in the Fortune 500.”
Other solutions like Signal are more appropriate as consumer privacy solutions,” Mitter said. “They lacked things like user management, including onboarding and offboarding. Privacy organizations do not have that, so when enterprises were using consumer-oriented encryption tools in times of crisis, they set themselves up for multiple downstream issues. ArmotText is the first of its kind – an end to end tool for communicating, messaging, file sharing – which maintains an audit trail while keeping others permanently locked out. It’s not for all enterprise communication, but for incident response, security operations, threat intelligence sharing and board comms. Those are so sensitive that you need a classified tier for them, and we are that classified tier.”
On paper, the company that became ArmorText was formed in 2015, but it is much more recent than that.
“We have really only been around in the last few years, since 2015, around the time that Secure Out of Band Collaboration came into being, ” Mitter indicated. “Since then we have expanded into a large chunk of the utility network and 80% of US households get their household power from our customers. Our many utility customers include small rural ones, and we also work with entities that provide sharing with rural police, as well as oil and gas, law firms, and parts of the Fortune 500.”
In recent years, ArmorText has added new capabilities in self-service and management.
“We now have more robust managed services capabilities,” Mitter said. “This includes partners now being able to manage us as part of a managed service offering.”
The ArmorText Partner Enablement Program begins as a single tier program, although there are plans to plans in 2024 to introduce tiered services based on AI-driven capabilities. There are also plans to introduce new onboarding tools for partners serving Global 2000 companies whose needs extend beyond Incident Response to broader continuity of operations rollouts.
“It’s now all a lot easier with the program,” Mitter indicated. “Before, we had the ability for partners to federate, but they had to call us to help out with emergency setup.” Now partners are able to create and manage unique ArmorText client directories with independent data governance and controls, fully manageable by the partner while ensuring client privacy through need-to-know access enforced by E2EE.
“After the vetted and onboarded, there is so much more robust training than there was before,” Mitter added. “They can create private networks as if we were doing it.” Partners also receive access to dedicated Subject Matter Experts [SMEs] to help with topics such as incident response planning, tabletop exercises, and best practices for data lifecycle controls and jurisdictional requirements. They also can use the ArmorText Secure Gateway for building custom integrations.
Mitter said that margins are also excellent.
“It depends on their business model,” he noted. “The cost models are very customizable, and we have given them flexibility on how to approach it. A small MSP is different from a big GSI.”
MSPs are a growing part of the partner network.
“One of the major things that has changed is managed security services and managed SOCs,” Mitter said. “More MSPs are looking for dedicated secure channels, and we are seeing more partners put their customers on the platform directly, even some who are not in the program.”
The program remains relatively select. Between strategic partners and resellers, ArmorText has 18 partners.
They also have a presence in Canada.
“For the Government of Canada’s CSPV [cybersecurity procurement vehicle], we were one of 14 vendors approved in the latest batch. That’s important because we already have partners involved in Canada.”
