- New Cyber Insurance Study Correlates Weak Security With Incident Risk
- Lenovo, Nokia Partner on Data Center Networking, Automation and AI
- Kaseya’s Big News: CEO Rolls Out Kaseya 365 User, Announces SaaS Alerts Acquisition
- The State of MSP M&A: So Many Buyers and So Few Quality MSPs for Sale
- Lenovo 360’s New Journeys a ‘Smart, Strategic Move’ for Partners
- Kaseya DattoCon: Voccola Says News Will Be ‘Bigger Than Kaseya 365’
Each week MSSP Alert brings you channel-focused business news from our affiliate site ChannelE2E.
We know that security service providers care about more than cybersecurity. There are business issues, news about tools, artificial intelligence advancements and more.
Here’s a look at the top headlines for the week from ChannelE2E.
New Cyber Insurance Study Correlates Weak Security With Incident Risk
A new cybersecurity study by reinsurance broker Gallagher Re found that the common wisdom around security monitoring and performance across businesses is correct – that strong security protections correlate to fewer security breaches and incidents, while poor protection adds up to higher rates of insurance claims and problems.
The 20-page global study, “Scanning the Horizon: How Broadening Our Use of Cybersecurity Data Can Help insurers,” evaluated some 589 million IP addresses to correlate cybersecurity risk predictors.
MSPs can help their customers fight these kinds of risks by improving their cybersecurity practices with strong cyber hygiene while also limiting their attack surfaces by removing insecure devices from the internet and closing their paths to the outside world, Derek Vadala, the chief risk officer of Bitsight, told ChannelE2E. “MSPs should proactively share objective evidence validating their effectiveness with customers.”
The Gallagher Re study evaluated analytics data from global cyber risk management specialist, Bitsight, which looked at security performance data of 62,000 organizations across 67 countries and from its own proprietary database of cybersecurity incidents and claims.
Lenovo, Nokia Partner on Data Center Networking, Automation and AI
Modernizing data center networking and automation to wring out more powerful capabilities that can further drive the next advances in AI is the aim of a new partnership between Lenovo and Nokia.
The partnership between the companies comes as growing AI demands in business and industry are broadly expanding in a marketplace that continues to find expected new uses for AI every day.
Under the deal, the companies will bring together the Lenovo ThinkSystem AI-ready line of high-performance servers and storage and Nokia’s data center network technologies and products. The Nokia technologies include data center fabric, IP routing, and DDoS security portfolios, as well as its recently announced Event-Driven Automation (EDA) platform for data centers.
By combining these technologies, Lenovo and Nokia say that they will boost their abilities to help their customers to meet the growing and evolving data processing and network performance requirements of modern AI, machine learning and other compute-intensive workloads. This becomes even more important, the companies say, as AI models are trained and as data centers for inferencing will be needed where AI clusters are networked. That can be within and between data centers at the edge, which requires high-speed, reliable and secure interconnectivity, according to Lenovo and Nokia.
Kaseya’s Big News: CEO Rolls Out Kaseya 365 User, Announces SaaS Alerts Acquisition
MIAMI - Kaseya has acquired SaaS Alerts and is adding a user security option to its Kaseya 365 offering at a promotional price of $2.79 per user per month. The addition will expand the company’s detect and response capabilities, extending those to user behavior in the cloud.
Kaseya’s capability expansion and acquisition put an emphasis on what has become a key strategic directive and opportunity for MSPs in today’s market – protecting and defending small and mid-sized businesses from cybersecurity threats.
Before announcing the SaaS Alerts deal in his keynote address at Kaseya DattoCon, CEO Fred Voccola told the story of the growing cybersecurity threat to small and midsized businesses. For instance, he said, SMBs are the number one target of cybercriminals, and ransomware attacks against SMBs have increased by 350% since 2020. Yet nearly 50% of SMBs aren’t properly protected due to cost concerns.
“Security is super important,” CEO Fred Voccola told the 3,500 MSPs here this week.
The State of MSP M&A: So Many Buyers and So Few Quality MSPs for Sale
Looking for a quality MSP to buy? Get in line. After a few years of frenzied M&As in the managed services market, deals slowed in 2023 and 2024. Sure, high interest rates, high inflation and other macroeconomic trends contributed to that slowdown. But if you ask anyone who watches the market closely, they’ll tell you the biggest problem is pipeline. There aren’t enough quality MSPs of a certain size.
At Kaseya DattoCon’s M&A Summit ahead of the actual DattoCon event, an audience poll by show of hands revealed that most of the audience of MSPs were looking to buy other MSPs. Only a few were looking to sell.
So what makes an MSP a quality target for buyers? [Check out Cogent Growth Partners’ perspective on what makes a quality MSP here.]
At Kaseya DattoCon’s M&A event, Evergreen Services VP Sydney Hockett provided some insights into what her company – a buy-and-hold-focused PE firm focused on MSPs – looks for in target acquisitions. Evergreen has acquired about 80 MSPs.
Lenovo 360’s New Journeys a ‘Smart, Strategic Move’ for Partners
Lenovo is aiming to help its partners boost their sales and revenue in specific market segments by offering five new pre-configured “partner journeys” that are designed to make it easier to sell Lenovo’s products and services.
The five Lenovo 360 partner journeys are being offered through the Lenovo 360 Global Partner Framework and are the first of what are expected to be a growing range of similar partner journey frameworks that the company will expand over time.
The first partner journey frameworks to be unveiled are Lenovo 360 for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Lenovo 360 for Global Systems Integrators (GSIs), Lenovo 360 for AI, Lenovo 360 for Data Management, and Lenovo 360 for Education. The programs are designed to make it easier for partners to sell across Lenovo’s portfolio of devices, infrastructure, services, and other offerings.
“This is a smart, strategic move by the team at Lenovo,” Shelly Kramer, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, told ChannelE2E. “Partners are a critical part of getting products and services to market, yet they are often challenged in ways that large tech brands are not. They are navigating this landscape often with smaller, lean teams, a pullback on marketing resources, lack of expertise, and are often challenged by a lack of sales enablement resources.”
Kaseya DattoCon: Voccola Says News Will Be ‘Bigger Than Kaseya 365’
Kaseya DattoCon kicks off on Tuesday, and ChannelE2E will be onsite covering what Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola has described as an announcement that is “bigger than Kaseya 365.”
Kaseya rolled out its single price MSP core service bundle K365 at its Kaseya Connect event earlier this year. Depending on who you asked, it either disrupted the industry, had the potential to spur a race to the bottom on pricing, or it was no big deal.
The bundle includes RMM, antivirus, EDR, MDR, patch management, ransomware rollback and endpoint backup.
In July Voccola told ChannelE2E that Kaseya had signed up 4,000 MSPs to manage five million endpoints with the Kaseya 365 license. During that conversation in July, Voccola said: “The uptake rate has been well beyond our expectations, and I think it’s been so successful.”
