Digital Defense vulnerability assessments are being offered to health care organizations for free beginning today, the company said. The SaaS vulnerability and risk management provider’s offer is for up to $1 million worth of free services.

The 20-year old company recently became a channel-led organization, launching a new partner program and portal about six months ago. The free Digital Defense vulnerability assessment is a new channel program open to new and existing partners.

Digital Defense’s Bob Layton

“We’re giving away $1 million in value of our own services. So we’re allowing these [health care] organizations to raise their hands and say, “Yes, please, I’d like to take advantage of this,” Bob Layton, chief revenue officer at Digital Defense, told Channel Futures. “Then if they don’t have a partner, we’re introducing them to one of our existing partners. For partners we’re currently talking to as recruits for our partner program, we’re allowing them to introduce their clients as well.”

There’s been an escalation in ransomware attacks at hospitals and health care organizations that aligns with the global pandemic. These attacks occur when resources at hospitals are stretched and attention is diverted. Digital Defense helps companies identify and prioritize how to take action against threats.

The security vendor’s partners are reporting serious threats.

“There are a lot of bad actors out there that are taking advantage of hospitals. This can be … taking a connected device offline that has to do with surgery or patient information. It may also be taking down a part of the network or stealing patient data,” said Layton.

This is an opportunity for prospective partners to get to know Digital Defense. It also lets health care organizations get to know both the vendor and its partners.

Channel Partner Program

The Digital Defense Partner Program focuses on new consumption models, particularly managed services. MSPs, MSSPs and managed detection and response (MDR) providers are a fit for Digital Defense.

“We have partners in our program that prefer us because we easily snap into their delivery models,” said Layton. “We give partners banded costs so they can go and build their own services where we fulfill the requirements on the back end. But since we’re a SaaS, and we’re delivered out of AWS from the cloud and we’re in all the cloud marketplaces, we can easily meet our partners and our customers in the cloud for those who want to consume that way.”

MDR providers are “nirvana” for customers, according to Layton.

“That’s because it combines all of the alerting and notification of a threat. And then it goes one step further taking automated response to remediate the threat,” he said.

The company has VAR partners, but many are transitioning to a managed services model. There are 60 partners in the Digital Defense partner program — that’s in the U.S. and Canada. The vendor is in discussions with 600 potential new partners.

This includes MSPs with no security offerings, as well as mature MSPs looking for something that easily fits into their operating model. Mature MSPs tend to look for a product that gives them multitenancy and better reporting, particularly proof of value given monthly, according to Layton.

“This allows their clients to see what they’re consuming and what the benefits are,” Layton said.

More Channel Investments

In March, Digital Defense brought in Joe LeBlanc as vice president of channel sales. LeBlanc held channel posts at Alert Logic, ServiceNow and BigFix, now a part of IBM.

Digital Defense’s Joe LeBlanc

Digital Defense customers are in industries such as financial services, insurance, health care and manufacturing. These are typically midsize businesses with 500-2,000 employees.

There is a long list of Digital Defense technology alliance partners. The company’s Digital Defense Frontline Cloud is a vulnerability and threat management service that integrates with SIEM, endpoint, SOAR, incident response, GRC and network security offers.

“The integrations are different for each ISV that we integrate with, but what we bring are elements that they don’t have in their own platform. Then we tie back into their console or software package,” said Layton. “So, for example, we may be identifying ransomware or something that is very difficult to detect unless it’s active, but we have the ability to identify it. And we can report it back to them.”

Health care organizations that Digital Defense doesn’t serve can sign up to get a free assessment over the next two months. It’s first come, first served for the ransomware assessments, or until the $1 million offer is gone, whichever comes first.