By Ericka Chickowski 1

OpenDNS is hoping to broaden the appeal of its cloud-delivered threat protection platform with a move this week to open its enforcement API to all customers and partners of its Umbrella Platform.

The API will give users the power to leverage in-house threat intelligence data to fine-tune automated threat prevention and policy enforcement actions. According to OpenDNS leaders, the idea is to lead the charge for better interoperability between security solutions.

“There is a very real industry pain point that enterprise customers face today. Unfortunately, security solutions don’t connect technically or work well together,” said Dan Hubbard, CTO of OpenDNS. “At OpenDNS, we felt it was important to take the lead on making security technology more interoperable and offering APIs as a key aspect of our platform. The value of threat intelligence does not come from mere information, but from the ability to programmatically translate that information into action.”

In addition to the API, OpenDNS also unveiled new partnerships with two threat intelligence platform providers, ThreatConnect and ThreatQuotient, which have integrated into the Umbrella security service. The ultimate goal of these integrations is to give customers a chance to reduce the time between threat detection and prevention, ideally down from hours to seconds, and immediately block suspect activity.

From a partner perspective, OpenDNS has been ramping up its efforts to work closely with the MSP community. Last week it launched its Partner Enablement Pack with co-branding assets to help support Umbrella for MSPs solution, which offers a multi-tenant dashboard and integrations with ConnectWise and Autotask to help manage many customers and ultimately drive down infection rates on customer devices by over 80 percent.

“In the increasingly competitive IT space, an MSP needs to be able to communicate beyond feeds, speeds and technology specifications. They need to be their customers’ trusted security advisor and must show the value they are providing to the business,” said Dmitriy “Dima” Kumets, senior product manager for OpenDNS. “The Partner Enablement Pack gives OpenDNS MSP partners pre-built marketing collateral to help them present to their customers to help them express and elevate the value of their offering.”