ConnectWise, in true ConnectWise form, had some major news to kick off its virtual IT Nation Connect conference. The provider announced it has acquired Perch Security and StratoZen, two cybersecurity firms dedicated to the needs of SMBs. 

The acquisitions aim to change the way technology service providers (TSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs) think about security. The objective is to eliminate the many silos around point solutions that plague the MSP industry.

ConnectWise’s Brian Downey

“We’ve been looking at the MSP and security market for a long time,” said Brian Downey, vice president of security product management, ConnectWise. “We started to see some commonalities in terms of the PSA and RMM market. The vendor community has gotten in the habit of providing new tools to solve various challenges. This has left MSPs with more tools than they know what to do with. Our goal was to solve this. These acquisitions will accelerate unifying that data and allowing MSPs to draw actionable results out of it. They will also now have the capabilities to analyze and automate that data.”

ConnectWise Fortify

The two cybersecurity firms have capabilities that will complement each other. As part of the ConnectWise Fortify security management solution, these technologies will provide data management capabilities both as a service and as core technology in the ConnectWise Fortify SOC. Perch says it provides the only MSP-designed SIEM in the industry. This massively simplifies things while providing the multitenant functionality MSPs need to support multiple SMB clients. Not only that, it easily captures data from the systems it is monitoring for cyberattacks on behalf of their customers.

StratoZen’s advanced automation and data analysis capabilities come into play on the data side of things. These capabilities take the data gathered from the Perch SIEM and turn it into actionable insights. This will help MSPs pounce on false positives and respond faster and more accurately, involving fewer people.

“Good security requires answering some basic questions that can be difficult to answer: What are my risks? How do I know when I’m under attack? And how do I respond?” said Downey. “The reason it’s hard is because our industry has taken the flawed approach of adding more tools, more staff, more complexity — all contributing to silos of chaos. With Perch and StratoZen, we’re changing that approach, capturing only the data MSPs need and helping them make sense of it so they can protect their customers more effectively and efficiently.”

Silos of Chaos

ConnectWise’s Jason Magee

“Just as we sought to control the ‘Silos of Chaos’ with our PSA and RMM solutions, we’re now doing it for cybersecurity. We want to make cybersecurity less complex for TSPs. [We do this] by providing technology that makes it easy to collect, assess and respond to security data from many different point products,” said Jason Magee, CEO, ConnectWise. “The acquisitions of these two cybersecurity firms are about far more than the technology. We are gaining extremely talented and innovative colleagues with a deep understanding of cybersecurity, and a laser focus on what their partners need to succeed. We’re going to infuse these strengths into the ConnectWise brand and partner experience.” 

“We recognized the economics of things,” said Jeff Bishop, chief product officer, ConnectWise. “We knew that we couldn’t keep layering cost on top of cost. At an endpoint and end-user level, enterprise costs won’t scale in the SMB market. This strategy is financially feasible for an MSP to take to these small and midsize businesses.”

The company also provided an update on ConnectWise Fusion. The unified platform and the future platform will support all ConnectWise products.