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Cybersecurity firm SecurityFirst on Tuesday launched a new partner program designed to help resellers and service providers make more money selling critical data protection to clients.

The SecurityFirst Channel Partner Program will provide sales enablement, marketing and channel pricing discounts to a cross-section of partners including “evangelists,” resellers, advisers and advocates with specialized reach into the midmarket and SMBs, the company said. Central to the program will be SecurityFirst’s DataKeep technology — an interoperable, data-centric offering aimed at meeting the needs of any commercial business or government entity.

SecurityFirst’s Nicholas Waddell

Nicolas Waddell, SecurityFirst channel sales director, tells Channel Partners his company has a history of working with OEM partners to integrate solutions into enterprise offerings.

“These are large, highly customized deals requiring dedicated staff to service,” he said. “With the DataKeep release of our product, we’ve developed an easily consumable version of this enterprise technology the channel can resell to address new and evolving business and government data-protection requirements. (This is) a new program designed to serve the needs of IT/VARs and service providers.”

The partner program will have two lines of support: the Channel Partner Program in which organizations looking to protect on-premises data might benefit from a perpetual technology licensing arrangement based on three levels; and the MSSP Program in which organizations moving to public cloud or hybrid environments can take advantage of a monthly subscription-based approach.

“The program is designed to offer service providers who have strong security offerings a critical new solution to fill in protection gaps that their customers have, and to do so without interrupting any other components of their existing solution set,” Waddell said. “DataKeep is a software solution that’s easy to deploy, simple to manage, and far more than a check-the-box encryption technology.”

New and updated regulations and presidential orders now are requiring organizations to protect any data collected from their customers that can be considered personally identifiable or pay significant fines, SecurityFirst noted.

“So many organizations with recently reported data loss events could have avoided – or at least significantly reduced – the impact to their customers of losing private data,” Waddell said. “Starting very soon, organizations will be sending fines to regulators along with their apologies to customers. This is close to a greenfield opportunity for selling into most midmarket companies.”

Richard Vaughn, also channel sales director, said the new program gives the ability for dozens of channel partners to “begin selling data protection in as little as 30 days to increase their deal sizes and profits” during fourth-quarter 2017.