Area 1 Security, a cloud email security company, has launched a North American partner program for MSPs, VARs and solution providers. The program enables channel partners to offer Area 1 security solutions that protect against business email compromise (BEC), credential harvesting, ransomware and other threats that secure email gateways (SEGs) sometimes miss.
Key features of Area 1's partner program include:
- Pay-per-phish pricing model
- Joint/co-sell go-to-market strategies
- Sales and technical enablement
Optiv, Guidepoint, Sada and Synnex (among others) have already joined the Area 1 partner ecosystem. In addition, Area 1 has launched a partner community in combination with its partner program.
Area 1 Security CEO: Partner Focused
The partner program surfaces only a few months after the security company hired Patrick Sweeney as CEO and raised $25 million in new funding.
In a July 2020 interview with MSSP Alert (below), Sweeney described his first priorities as CEO -- and the company's commitment to MSSPs (managed security services providers) and other types of channel partners. Sweeney also described how Area 1 differentiates its business from rival email security providers:
A Closer Look at Area 1's Email Security Cloud Service
Area 1 offers Horizon, which detects and disables phishing attacks before they cause damage, the company said. Horizon protects organizations against the following types of phishing attacks:
- Email: Guards against phishing attacks that use cloud-based mail transfer agents or cloud APIs/connectors.
- Network: Guards against phishing attacks that can shut down an organization's network.
- Web: Guard against phishing attacks that use a globally distributed, recursive DNS service.
Furthermore, Horizon provides preemptive discovery of phishing infrastructure via web crawling, link crawls, sandboxing, user impersonation and computer vision-based detections, Area 1 stated. Horizon also detects ransomware, malware, spoofs, BEC messages and other types of phishing attacks.
