‘7 Minutes’ with SecurityFirst Channel Chiefs Richard Vaughn and Nicholas Waddell

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

SecurityFirst, which just launched its partner program aimed at resellers and managed service providers, is sure to benefit from mounting customer panic as we move closer to May 2018, when GDPR goes into effect. The only thing experts seem to agree on is that no one knows whether the European Union will move aggressively to make an example of a company that’s lost personally identifiable data on its citizens. If it does so, that company could well be based in the United States. And given the size of potential fines, it’s likely to be a very expensive object lesson.

SecurityFirst’s Richard Vaughn

We discuss the specifics of the SecurityFirst Channel Partner Program here. Short version, it has the expected sales enablement, marketing help and pricing discounts, and is aimed at partners serving SMBs and midmarket customers. There are separate tracks for resellers, with three metal tiers based on license sales, and MSPs that have security practices and are more interested in MRR.

The technology is also suited for enterprises and government agencies, and SecurityFirst CEO Jim Varner says the firm is seeing spending on data security doubling year-over-year.

The DataKeep encryption software uses FIPS 140-2 and cryptographic bit splitting. It provides a central management console and encryption agents that protect data from creation through storage, whether on-premises or in the cloud. The inclusion of key management and auditable access logging address two of the main pain points that have stalled wider use of encryption. Even Equifax said that stolen data was in the clear, a rather stunning admission.

SecurityFirst’s Nicholas Waddell

We asked co-directors of channel Richard Vaughan and Nicholas Waddell to tackle our seven key questions. Vaughn came to SecurityFirst from Toshiba, while Waddell has worked with Cylance as well as Ingram Micro, where he built vertical-market channel programs. They’re jointly responsible for the SecurityFirst channel strategy, including developing the pricing models and enablement resources necessary to effectively support the channel partner community, and for recruiting strategic partners.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Waddell & Vaughn: SecurityFirst’s DataKeep data-protection solution represents an additional revenue and profit opportunity for the channel. It complements other network security layers – firewall, IPS, SIEM, incident response – and operates across on-premises, cloud or hybrid environments to safeguard a customer’s data.  According to Stratistics MRC, the global market for encryption software was $2.45 billion in 2015 and will grow to $10.21 billion by 2022. That’s an annual increase of 22.6 percent. This a high-growth opportunity for partners looking to expand their …