Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

BitTitan announced Tuesday the launch of its M&A growth initiative with the hiring of Kirk Swanson as corporate development associate.

BitTitan’s Kirk Swanson

In the newly added role, Swanson’s main mission is to strengthen BitTitan’s market position through strategic investments in the enterprise cloud. He comes to BitTitan after working at investment firm D.A. Davidson & Co. in Seattle, where he advised public and private companies on mergers and acquisitions, capital markets and strategic advisory assignments.

“As BitTitan looks to enhance its global operations, we are seeking investment opportunities in innovative technologies to provide additional support to our customers around the world,” said Barney Silver, BitTitan’s vice president of finance and operations. “Kirk brings a wealth of experience working with both domestic and international companies and overseeing cross-border transactions. He will undoubtedly play an integral role in helping BitTitan identify and pursue key acquisitions to grow our business.”

Specifically, BitTitan is interested in identifying companies with cloud-based SaaS solutions and a strong presence with IT service providers or managed service providers (MSPs). 

“Kirk is well-versed with M&A strategizing and advising organizations large and small on the nuances of mergers and acquisitions,” says Silver. “His expertise will be pivotal in helping BitTitan target the most optimal acquisition opportunities and drive our business growth to enhance the support we provide to our global customers.”

Security vendor WatchGuard on Tuesday said it’s expanding its flexible payment option that allows partners to buy security hardware and services with a monthly subscription.

WatchGuard Subscription is a pay-as-you-go option that expands the vendor’s current FlexPay program that offers one- and three-year fixed term contracts and MSSP prepaid points.

WatchGuard’s Michelle Welch

“MSPs and resellers are increasingly leveraging monthly, pay-as-you-go options for their customers because so few vendors and distributors offer compatible purchasing structures, they’re often faced with capital bottlenecks and cash flow issues,” said Michelle Welch, senior vice president of marketing at WatchGuard. “As a 100% channel-focused company that’s dedicated to partner support and enablement, the new WatchGuard Subscriptions offering is designed to further simplify, streamline and strengthen how our partners do business with WatchGuard and meet their customers’ security needs.”

The subscription option is available for tabletop and rackmount Fireboxes and WatchGuard security services. The vendor offers a comprehensive portfolio of security services, such as intrusion prevention, gateway antivirus, application control, spam prevention and URL filtering, protection against malware, ransomware and data breaches. These services integrate with a WatchGuard Firebox appliance.

The vendor expects that the new subscription option will appeal to IT solution providers looking to avoid opex or leasing solutions and fixed-term contracts that limit scalability. WatchGuard is making its subscription option for products and services available in the U.S. through the Synnex Stellr marketplace. Synnex rebranded its cloud/mobility business unit to Stellr last May. WatchGuard will expand subscriptions to other regions throughout 2020.

Also last May, WatchGuard expanded its WatchGuardOne partner program, offering multiple paths of entry with individual specializations in network security, secure Wi-Fi and multifactor authentication (MFA). This latest option expands the vendor’s routes to partnership for VARs and MSPs.

From IT Pro Today

Throughout most of my 30-year IT career, the most basic password policy best practices have remained largely unchanged. While there is something to be said for consistency, the idea that certain practices have been recommended for three decades or more is a bit unsettling to say the least. When an industry holds onto a practice for such as long time it begs the question of whether that practice is outdated. One also has to question whether some of the basic security best practices that have been in place for what seems like forever might have been misguided from the very beginning.

Microsoft recently drew a mixture of praise and sharp criticism when the company announced that it no longer recommends periodic password changes. This announcement garnered a lot of attention, but there are other aspects of Microsoft’s current password recommendations for Office 365 that might best be described as counterintuitive. These include:

• Maintain an eight-character minimum length requirement. (Longer isn’t necessarily better.)
• Don’t require character composition requirements.
• Don’t require mandatory periodic password resets for user accounts.

So, as you can see, Microsoft’s password policy best practices longer recommend periodic password changes or the use of special characters. Microsoft has even gone so far as to state that longer passwords are not necessarily better. So, what gives?

According to Microsoft, rules have a way of normalizing passwords. “Normalizing” refers to the practice of taking an input string and converting it into a standardized format. When a user enters a phone number into a VoIP phone, for instance, the user might enter a long string of numbers (8005551234), they might use dashes (800-555-1234), or they might even use parentheses and dashes combined ((800) 555-1234). As such, a VoIP application will typically use normalization techniques to convert the user’s input – whatever it may be – into a standardized format that the underlying software can use.

Password rules do the same sort of thing to passwords. Suppose that an organization requires passwords to be at least eight characters in length, contain at least one uppercase and at least one lowercase character, a special symbol, and at least one number. People who know these rules can use what they know about the organization’s password requirements to automatically eliminate out a lot of potential passwords. For example, a password cracker can be configured to automatically ignore any potential password with fewer than eight characters. It can also rule out any string that uses all lowercase letters or all numbers.

The previously referenced Microsoft document also mentions that it’s critically important to take human nature into account when devising a password policy. If, for example, a password policy requires the use of a capital letter, then there is a really good chance that a user will use a capital letter as their password’s first character. After all, we have all been conditioned from an early age to start sentences with a capital letter and to capitalize the first letter of proper nouns.

As for no longer requiring periodic password resets, Microsoft mentions that it can be easy for someone to guess a password based on the password that was previously used. When required to periodically change passwords, users have a tendency to use password transformations as a way of making the new password easier to remember. These password transformations might include things like incrementing a number at the end of a password or perhaps embedding the month and year into the password and using that as the basis for the password transformation.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill actually has some interesting evidence to back this idea up. In a study, researchers were given access to about 10,000 accounts that were no longer in use (such as accounts belonging to former students). The researchers were supplied with hashes for the accounts’ previously used passwords, and in the span of several months had cracked a large percentage of those passwords.

The researchers then tried to guess the accounts’ current passwords based on the previously used passwords. The researchers were able to guess the current password within five guesses for 17% of the accounts. In those cases, knowing a users’ previous passwords made it easy to guess their current passwords.

It seems inevitable that passwords will eventually be replaced by biometric and other multifactor authentication technologies. For now, though, it’s important to take human nature into consideration when formulating password policies rather than simply accepting the static quo that has been in place for decades.

D&H Distributing’s VAR business grew double digits – 20% – in 2019, successful by all accounts for the hyperfocused SMB market distributor. Moving into 2020, D&H’s plan is to continue its steadfast strategic business commitments and help partners boost their confidence adopting new technologies.

Last year, all customer segments – small VARs, midsize VARs, MSPs, collaboration partners utilizing more services, the public sector (local, state and federal, K-12 education) – of the distributor’s business were up. D&H has every intention to make 2020 an equally profitable year for itself and partner customers.

D&H kicked off 2020 announcing, this week, that RingCentral is now a part of the company’s cloud solutions portfolio for UCaaS.

“We’ve been carefully cultivating partners who can offer the level of resources and support to make it easy for our customers to enter new segments, regardless of their previous level of expertise in telecom or the UC space,” said Jason Bystrak, vice president of D&H’s cloud business unit.

D&H Distributing’s Peter DiMarco

Peter DiMarco, vice president of VAR sales at D&H, outlined the company’s 2020 strategy in an interview with Channel Futures.

Channel Futures: Before talking about 2020, what fueled D&H’s success in 2019?

Peter DiMarco: Our success in 2019 is a result of all the investments that we made in specific areas around solutions. One being investment in our cloud business, executing our state of the market cloud marketplace and cloud platform — that got a lot of traction because of its ease of use; [also], investing in our cloud team — we have 30-plus resources that are focused on cloud and MSP services; and then, onboarding a broad portfolio of cloud services.

We’ve also seen strong growth in collaboration and ProAV/digital signage technology that had a lot of strength in the enterprise and public sector, and now, what I consider some game-changing technology and solutions around collaboration, public rooms, and the disruption that we’re seeing in price points for the SMB. We’ve made investments in resources around presale design and engineering, and sales support, so customers are able to take those solutions out into the marketplace.

We also saw strong growth in the esports category, and also all of our core solutions areas, such as infrastructure, security, networking, devices and compute. Working with [technology] partners like HPE, helping with their build-to-order program, putting what I call velocity solutions together for the SMB partner, has helped as well.

CF: Any areas that didn’t do as well as you had hoped for in 2019?

PD: In areas such as collaboration we’d like to see a lot more transformation, and VARs and MSPs adopting this technology and being able to compete with the CDWs of the world. For us, it’s more about adoption than market growth.

Certainly, for cloud, VARs are putting together a full-blown MSP and cloud strategy; we saw faster adoption on that.

CF: Let’s talk about 2020.

PD: For 2020, it’s more of the same. In the SMB space you have to be able to take broader solution trends that are going on in the marketplace and distill them down to what an SMB and MSP can absorb. We tend to have multiyear strategies that help the partner adopt solutions and help the small customer leverage technology.

If I look at cloud and services, I think we’re going to have a big year in [anything as a service] XaaS. Regardless of the solution, whether it’s a Pro AV solution, networking, infrastructure, server, device, we’re able to take that hardware and …

(Pictured above: The Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, which debuted at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York City.)

NRF BIG SHOW — Samsung is extending its push into the market for first line workers with the launch of a semi-rugged version of its Galaxy smartphone.

The Galaxy XCover Pro, introduced over the weekend at the annual National Retail Federation Big Show in New York, is aggressively priced at $499 and will include a push-to-talk button integrated with Microsoft Teams.

While the Samsung’s new Android phone isn’t as rugged as more industrial grade devices from the likes of Zebra and Panasonic, it isn’t as expensive and it’s not intended for extreme environments. It’s targeted at customer-facing workers in verticals such as retail, health care and field service that may need something that can withstand more wear and tear than its consumer-grade Galaxy Note.

Samsung’s Galaxy XCover Pro looks and feels more like Samsung’s flagship Galaxy smartphone but is engineered with an IP68 water- and dust-resistant and is MIL-STD 810G rated. According to Samsung it will withstand drops of five feet without a case. Its 6.3-inch FHD+ Infinity Display has a touchscreen optimized to work in adverse conditions such as rain or snow and for workers wearing gloves. It has a replaceable battery and two SIM card slots.

At half the price, Samsung believes the Galaxy XCover Pro won’t have many of the bells and whistles of the latest high-end Galaxy Note such as support for Wi-Fi 6 or its DeX feature. But it believes it will appeal to customers who would like to equip all their firstline workers with their own phones to enable them to access information for their respective customers.

Samsung’s Mike Coleman at NRF 2020

“It’s a mid-range device that gives us the ability to compete with much higher end devices from some of our competitors,” said Samsung Mobile channel chief Mike Coleman. “It’s much less expensive from cost of acquisition as well as cost of ownership.”

The new phone is Samsung’s latest effort to offer devices that target first line workers. Last year, the company launched the Tab Active and the Tab Active Pro tablets.

“We’re taking what we’ve learned on the consumer side and transforming that into a B2B solution set,” Coleman said.

Samsung will promote the new device with marketing programs and incentives, to be revealed closer to the ship date, set for the first half of this year, according to Coleman.

Observers said Samsung is making an aggressive push into the market.

“It’s a very attractive price,” said independent industry analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates. “Samsung is going after the midmarket frontline worker at companies that don’t have to spend $2,000 or $3,000 to give each employee a device. While it’s not fully rugged, it’s much more rugged than a typical smartphone.”

Customers can use the push-to-talk feature of the Galaxy XCover Pro to invoke any function on the device, but officials emphasized that it will automatically launch Microsoft Teams via the “walkie-talkie” feature Microsoft is announcing for Teams at the NRF event.

Microsoft Teams product marketing manager Keara James was at the Samsung booth at NRF Sunday and Monday demonstrating the new push-to-talk feature on the Galaxy XCover Pro.

Microsoft’s Keara James at NRF 2020

”For firstline workers, now we’re enabling persistent push-to-talk communication with integration on the X Pro,” James said. “There’s been high demand for this from our customers.”

Kelly Ungs, senior director of global channels at Ivanti, a launch partner, said the push-to-talk Microsoft Teams feature could prove to become popular.

“We use Microsoft Teams every day for text and voice chat and this is a brilliant move,” Ungs said.

Ivanti is a launch partner for the new phone for customers. Ivanti Wavelink, the is a terminal emulation tool, will be among the various accessories offered with the new phone.

Another launch partner is Verizon, which will be the first to offer the new phone. While the agreement with Verizon and its channel partners will let them offer the new phone first – similar to a deal last year with the carrier to offer its first 5G-capable Galaxy phone – it’s not an exclusive arrangement. Samsung will also offer an unlocked version, and subsequently with other carriers.

The phone will also include Samsung POS, the company’s point-of-sale offering that will work with Visa’s Tap to Phone pilot program.

From Nov. 18 to 22, more than 1,600 attendees–including Ingram Micro associates, reseller partners, vendors and members of the press–convened at the Gaylord Rockies resort in Denver for the biggest and best ONE event ever.

New Features Highlighted What’s New in IT

ONE 2019 had several firsts–from the fabulous immersive opening presentation of the general session to the Solutions Showcase featuring such standouts as the Microsoft/Intel dome and Cisco live podcast booth. A new technology tracks format was introduced at this year’s event, offering breakout sessions that gave participants the opportunity to delve deeper into specific areas of interest, such as big data, IoT, security and XaaS.

An Integrated Retail Experience Infused with IoT Technology

A definite highlight of this year’s ONE was the IoT retail pop-up store where visitors had a unique opportunity to learn firsthand how IoT solutions from innovative companies like Advantech, Fortinet, Scale Computing and Zebra are transforming the retail experience. The solutions on display included heat map and store traffic flow camera-based technology, smart price tags and shelf inventory tracking, as well as a software-designed hyperconverged infrastructure designed specifically for the retail industry.

Keynote Speakers Look Ahead

Rami Ramin, CEO of Juniper Networks, Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of Veeam, and Renee Mauborgne, co-director of Blue Ocean Strategy, provided valuable perspectives on where the technology industry is headed–and the continuous challenges facing organizations as they undergo digital transformation. Attendees came away with insights they can use to position their own and their customers’ businesses for success moving forward.

For a closer look at ONE 2019, watch the highlight reel from the event.

 A Must-Attend Event for the Tech Industry

 Ingram Micro ONE is the pre-eminent networking and education experience in the tech industry. Every year the event connects key players across the IT ecosystem, offering a prime opportunity to connect and drive new business with the channel’s most success-minded solution providers. Plans are already underway for next year’s event. For updates on what’s planned for ONE 2020, visit https://imaginenext.ingrammicro.com/one-north-america periodically.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.

NortonLifeLock, LogicMonitor and Entisys360 were among companies in the channel that unveiled acquisitions Monday.

NortonLifeLock, previously Symantec, is selling ID Analytics, a provider of credit and fraud risk solutions for enterprises, to LexisNexis Risk Solutions for $375 million. The transaction is expected to close this quarter.

More than 450 companies in the United States use ID Analytics to make risk-based decisions designed to improve customer experiences, enhance revenue, reduce fraud and drive cost savings.

Marcy Theobald, LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ spokesperson, tells us it’s too early to discuss what the acquisition will mean to her company’s partners. ID Analytics will operate as part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ Marcy Theobald

ID Analytics solutions complement LexisNexis Risk Solutions in two strategic areas: fraud and identity management, offering analytic models and verification solutions to help customers identify consumer risk; and credit risk decisioning, utilizing data attributes to give organizations a better understanding of risk, she said.

The integration of ID Analytics capabilities will enable LexisNexis Risk Solutions customers to gain a more complete picture of enterprise-wide risk in today’s global, mobile and digital economy by providing physical, digital, device and identity verification and authentication solutions. Becoming part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions will align complementary offerings allowing customers to better detect fraud and manage risk, Theobald said.

“The sale of ID Analytics is another step in the transformation of NortonLifeLock into a pure-play consumer cyber safety leader,” says Vincent Pilette, NortonLifeLock’s CEO. “We can now be completely focused on our singular mission to protect all areas of consumers’ online lives.”

Also Monday, LogicMonitor announced it has acquired Unomaly, a Stockholm, Sweden,-based global provider of infrastructure monitoring and intelligence across both on-premise and cloud. LogicMonitor said the acquisition accelerates its “AIOps roadmap” and will help ITOps teams gain the intelligent insights needed to determine when and how to embrace automation in order to resolve IT infrastructure issues before they disrupt the business.

Additionally, DevOps teams will be able to access insights derived from unexpected events and changes in infrastructure or applications, in order to optimize and refine continuous delivery approaches.

Mark Banfield, LogicMonitor‘s chief revenue officer, tells us his company has more than 10 years of experience building relationships with partners, and “we don’t do anything that impacts our partners without understanding their backgrounds and what’s important to them.”

LogicMonitor’s Mark Banfield

“Using Unomaly’s patented and operationalized machine-learning algorithms, LogicMonitor’s hybrid IT infrastructure monitoring and intelligence platform will deliver expanded AIOps capabilities to help partners quickly and efficiently gain insight to avoid potential performance issues and surface intelligence out of pertinent data to drive useful operations actions for their customers,” he said. “Adding log intelligence to the LogicMonitor platform will allow partners to realize new revenue streams and provide more innovation and value to their customers. AIOps is an important trend in the market, and this acquisition gives all of our partners including SIs, resellers, VARs and MSPs a way to differentiate and address the growing demands of the enterprise.”

Unomaly doesn’t have a partner program; the plan is to leverage LogicMonitor’s global partner community for the Unomaly solution, Banfield said.

Also Monday, Entisys360, an IT consultancy specializing in the deployment and delivery of advanced IT infrastructure, virtualization, security, automation and cloud-first solutions, announced it has purchased Performance Technology Partners’ (PTP) cybersecurity technology and support solutions assets.

Entisys360 said the PTP technology and services offering it’s buying will help it establish itself as one of the West Coast’s leading providers of cybersecurity services. Entisys360 soon plans to leverage the assets to create a …

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As business executives approach a new decade, they must harness the potential of the non-employee workforce, leverage new and innovative talent acquisition models, and utilize progressive technology platforms to facilitate scalability across all enterprise functions.

This research report will highlight the criticality of workforce agility in the evolving world of work and present recommendations and guidance on how to best tap into the power of digital staffing platforms and talent marketplaces to stay ahead of the competition.

The threat of Iran turning to cyberattacks on the United States could pose additional challenges and create new opportunities for MSSPs and other cybersecurity providers.

Tom Kellermann, head cybersecurity strategist at VMware Carbon Black and former cybersecurity commissioner for President Obama, told GlobalData he anticipates “significant and at times very serious cyberwarfare activity from Iran over the next few weeks.”

“I do think that this will be prolonged, that the cyberattacks against the United States will be prolonged,” he said. “They will mimic more of an insurgency than one-off massive attacks due to the nature of which Iranians have successfully burrowed into numerous U.S. critical infrastructures over the past couple of years, specifically in energy, and that backdoor and that footprint on those systems has yet to be fully eliminated.”

Debbie Gordon, CEO of Cloud Range Cyber, tells us it’s certainly possible that there will be an increase in attacks.  There are specific industries that may be bigger targets, including financial, telecom and energy, especially with threats to critical infrastructure. Common threats may also focus on website defacement as well as attacks where data is deleted, she said.

So how can companies know if they have adequate protections in place?

Cloud Range Cyber’s Debbie Gordon

“Determine your security posture, including people, process and technology,” Gordon said. “Most companies focus too much on technology and overlook the other two. You don’t know what you don’t know; therefore, practice and see. Simulate cyberattacks in a protected environment using a cyber range ensures that everyone, from security analysts all the way to the CEO, know exactly what to do and how to do it. Traditional tabletop exercises are not enough; simulation needs to start before a threat is even detected.”

Successful companies are doing simulated attacks with their security operations center (SOC) teams once per month using different attack scenarios to ensure that they are prepared for any type of threat, whether it is ransomware, website defacement, man in the middle, or a SQL injection attack, she said. Additionally, given that there are unknown threat vectors, analysts need to practice critical thinking in order to be prepared for the unknown.

“Because of the growing threat landscape, MSSPs can focus on increasing their understanding of potential threats, by practicing detection response and remediation to the increasing threat landscape,” Gordon said. “New and persistent threats from state actors and others constantly challenge MSSPs with continuing to develop the skills of their blue team operators that are tasked with protecting and securing the assets of their customers. The more they can be prepared, the more confident their customers will be. MSSPs should practice realistic simulation exercises using a cyber range in order to practice detection response and remediation. In a simulated environment, they can measure improvements on detection and response times, which will give customers confidence that they are staying ahead of the increasing challenges.” 

Additionally, successful MSSPs should work with their customers to simulate the handoff depending on where the MSSP’s responsibility ends and the customer’s begins — in terms of response and remediation, she said. They should simulate the handoff and ensure that the response and remediation, if that is the customer’s responsibility, is also to practice closing the loop on the entire threat, she said.

Aside from having necessary technology and processes in place, the primary roadblock affecting most organizations continues to be the growing cybersecurity skills shortage and …