Security Roundup: Tech Data, CenturyLink, Duo-Sophos, 2nd Watch

At its Channel Link conference this week in Austin, Texas, IT distributor Tech Data unveiled new offerings as part of its RECON Security Suite, providing access for partners to smaller, lesser-known security vendors.

In addition to the original 24×7 security monitoring service, now called RECON SOC and delivered by BlackStratus’ CYBERShark, the suite includes several subscription-based security offerings. Alex Ryals, Tech Data’s vice president of security solutions, tells us the goal here is not to compete with the bigger vendors like Cisco and Fortinet, but instead to “fill gaps sort of in the portfolio of some of our larger vendors with unique solutions that I think are interesting.”

Tech Data’s Alex Ryals and Tracy Holtz at Channel Link 2018.

“I talk to three or four vendors a week in the security space, and whenever I see someone that I’m like, ‘Huh, that’s really an interesting idea, and I want to invest in them, but I don’t know what that looks like,’ we’ve come up with this RECON security suite as a way to bring a voice to some of the smaller vendors that we want our partners to know about — people I think are going to be a name you’ll hear about more in a couple of years,” he said.

All of the offerings are niche in the way they solve unique problems in cybersecurity, Ryals said. And the suite is aligned with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework of identify, protect, detect, respond and recover.

“These categories are a great way for a partner to position a holistic security posture to the customer,” he said. “So I wanted to position these offerings in the same way because we’re already teaching our partners how to leverage the NIST framework to better tell a story.”

The new offerings include:

• RECON Policy, a library of more than 200 different security policy documents pre-developed so customers can use them to comply with regulations or to vet a cloud provider.
• RECON Radar (Pwnie Express), which discovers, fingerprints and inventories all IT and Internet of Things (IoT) devices and then monitors the behavior of network devices for indicators of compromise or sabotage, and provides direct response to neutralize the threats.
• RECON Priority (Cyr3con), which provides cyberthreat intelligence, mined from the dark web, to prioritize vulnerabilities and security threats in the customer’s environment and assist in prioritizing patches customers should apply to their critical business system.
• RECON ProServ, a catalog of security services offered by Tech Data and its security partners.
• RECON Risk (Arx Nimbus), which assesses security risk by inputting quantitative capabilities and financial data into an insurance-grade algorithm to inform company executives on the financial benefits to mitigating a security limitation or the risk/cost of not spending the money to mitigate that security vulnerability.
• RECON Restore, a set of backup/recovery vendors from Tech Data, such as Veeam and Veritas.

“We hope to launch two, possibly three (suite offerings) each quarter,” Ryals said. “We’ve already got next quarter’s two lined up today that will all be ready to go. These are all based on feedback from partners on what they’d like to see. I talk to three to five partners a week, and my team talks to 40 partners a week, so we won’t be short on feedback.”

Tracy Holtz, Tech Data’s director of security and information management, tells us all partner types can benefit from the security suite.

“MSPs are more equipped in terms of their practices around building a business based on subscription that they’ll naturally adopt those solutions and bring them into their portfolio,” she said. “But certainly VARs and resellers can …