Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

The second quarter saw a whopping 55,240% increase in ransomware activity, with attacks becoming more common and more damaging.

That’s according to MSSP Nuspire‘s 2021 Q2 Quarterly Threat Landscape Report. Sourced from 90 billion traffic logs, it outlines new cybercriminal activity and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). It also includes additional insight from its threat intelligence partner, Recorded Future.

Josh Smith is a security analyst at Nuspire. He said his company has never before seen such an increase in ransomware activity.

Nuspire’s Josh Smith

“Ransomware-based threat actors are attacking organizations for financial gain,” he said. “They infiltrate a network, steal data, encrypt the network, then extort their victims into paying on threat of releasing the information to the public. If the information contains personal information like Social Security numbers, addresses and other personally identifiable information (PII), it can be especially damaging to clients/users of the victim organization.”

No Industry Is Safe

The spike in ransomware activity began just a few weeks before the DarkSide ransomware group carried out the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack. The reason for the increase is unknown and it may not be related to Colonial Pipeline. But one can speculate that the increase could be from the same campaign with Colonial Pipeline.

“Really no industry is safe as the threat actors will attack pretty much anyone they can,” Smith said. “Some ransomware groups have stated they will avoid certain sectors such as health care and government in what is assumed is a way to help keep governmental action from coming down on them. Some actors have specifically targeted health care due to the nature of their work and the urgency involved with getting those networks back online.”

Additional findings from Nuspire’s report include:

• Malware activity was up nearly 42%. Trojan activity, in particular the new JS/Valkyr family of trojans, continues to drive it.
• Botnet activity was down 50% from the first quarter. This likely resulted from the removal of Emotet.
• A 51% decrease in exploit activity from the first quarter. However, that’s starting to trend back up this quarter. There’s also a large increase in secure shell brute force activity that has not been seen before.

More Monitoring Needed

Organizations need to monitor their technology stacks for newly published vulnerabilities and patch as soon as possible, Smith said.

“Additionally, a lot of ransomware is initially deployed via phishing attachments, [so] ensuring users know how to recognize them [is important],” he said. “Using advanced endpoint protection that has heuristics and behavioral analysis goes beyond standard malware signatures and can identify ransomware activity and stop it. An MSSP can assist an organization by identifying threat actors targeting their industry vertical, and what tactics and techniques they most commonly use. Once identified, can MSSP can determine what gaps may exist within a cybersecurity plan at an organization and help remediate.”

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

With the increasing threat landscape and recent workplace shifts to support remote users, many companies are deploying a zero trust security model to mitigate, detect and respond to cyber risks across their environment. Looking ahead, the next evolution in authentication is passwordless.

Zero trust principles help protect against identity and access-based security risks by requiring all users–whether inside or outside the organization’s network–to be authenticated, authorized and continuously validated for security configuration and posture checks before granted access to applications and data.

Zero trust relies on robust user authentication and device validation over network and endpoint security to protect applications and data against new and emergent threats. Instead of security enforcement at the network perimeter, zero trust focuses on protecting applications and surface areas. Users and devices are not automatically trusted because they happen to be behind the enterprise perimeter or on a trusted network.

While each organization may have a varying approach to deploying Zero Trust, the building blocks are generally the same, including establishing trust in every access request and securing access across their applications and network.

Deploying a zero trust architecture for the workforce provides a series of benefits, including improving the end user experience by allowing access to some applications or resources that traditionally require VPN access and streamlining authentication through multifactor authentication (MFA). Organizations can often leverage their existing security investments to deploy zero trust–including authentication, network access control, logging, device management, and endpoint detection and response–to improve their overall security posture.

The Move to Passwordless

The same zero trust architectural components can also be leveraged for the next evolution in authentication, which is passwordless access. The appeal of moving to passwordless authentication is that it unburdens IT departments that must continuously manage and reset passwords for users, which is time-consuming and expensive to maintain. For end users, managing multiple passwords across various applications and devices can be unwieldy, often resulting in reusing the same passwords that can be easily compromised and lead to data breaches.

When implemented correctly, passwordless authentication eliminates the password from the authentication flow while maintaining MFA security. In effect, passwordless enhances security while simultaneously decreasing authentication friction for users–a win-win for IT infrastructure.

While the promise of passwordless authentication is exciting, it’s important to think strategically about deploying new technology. By placing the foundational components of zero trust in place first–like SSO, MFA and device trust–the transition to passwordless will be smoother and more secure. As passwordless is a relatively nascent technology trend, organizations should consider a phased rollout, targeting users and authentication scenarios that make the most sense from a technical and business perspective.

Brad Arkin is Senior Vice President, Chief Security and Trust Officer, Cisco. Brad leads Cisco’s Security and Trust Organization, whose core mission is to ensure Cisco meets its security and privacy obligations to customers, regulators, employees and other stakeholders. Prior to joining Cisco, Arkin was Chief Security Officer at Adobe and has held management positions at @Stake and Cigital. Arkin holds a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science and Mathematics from the College of William and Mary, a Master of Science (MS) in Computer Science from George Washington University, and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Columbia University and London Business School.

 This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.

Shannon Sbar

There’s no doubt the way we work and how industries operate have changed in the wake of the pandemic. In fact, it’s likely the market will continue to shift and the norms that businesses operate under today will be different 12, 24 and 36 months from now.

As noted by Forrester Analyst Jay McBain, “The output of this will be a remote (or residential) topology that will require new levels of service, support, infrastructure, security, compliance, and continuity.” A new set of standards and best practices are being ushered in that define a successful relationship between vendors, managed service providers (MSPs) and end users. Moving forward, it will be important for end users to identify partners that have the flexibility to adapt with their business and to do it quickly. This means partners will look for vendors who can provide continuous support, collaboration and engagement for long-term success.

Getting the Most from Partnerships

When it comes to maximizing partnerships in the post-pandemic world, vendors, MSPs and end users will have different, but complementary priorities. Partnerships are most successful when it becomes a true collaboration between the end user, the partner and the vendor to jointly solve the business problem.

For a vendor, the MSP needs to be top of mind at every stage, from product development and presale all the way through the sale and post-sale. At each point, collaboration is important to ensuring the MSP understands the offer’s value proposition, the resources available for them to incorporate the offer and the support they’ll receive to successfully market the offer. From there the partner can scale faster without incurring additional sales investment costs to identify new opportunities.

Not only will MSPs enjoy exposure to new opportunities and resulting revenue, but they’ll also gain access to more data to provide a holistic view of customer environments and drive future sales. To get to this point vendors need to ensure the end customer’s interests are represented in the offer’s value proposition and recommend best practices and sales tactics for MSPs that will resonate with end users. A support model around the full offer life cycle also aids in bringing full value to the MSP’s business and the customer experience.

For the end-users, agreement on the plan and business goals are most critical. They must understand where gaps in the plan exist, determine what points to manage internally and what can be managed through MSPs. They need partners they can trust to ensure alignment of the goals, timelines and deliverables. As businesses evolve rapidly, it’s important for customers to track measurable outcomes and ensure the MSP is providing the type of service required to meet business objectives. Customers can then focus on their own business and doing what they do best while outsourcing the challenge to an expert who can address it without disrupting their core business.

The Most Important MSP Attributes

To position themselves well in the post-pandemic market, MSPs need to focus on two core attributes: competency and business alignment. MSPs want to align with their customers’ business needs and understand how their offer fills in gaps and meets customer expectations.

The customer needs to feel confident that the partner can …

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland is a global board-level adviser, partner level management consultant and non-executive director. She has significant transformational, successful M&A experience, including in the tech sector.

Karen Thomas-Bland

She says there are five big integration challenges for technology acquirers.

Check out our slideshow above for the five big challenges to successful M&A in the tech sector.

NWN has completed its integration of Carousel Industries, and the combined company is launching new and updated products and services.

NWN Carousel is now a $1 billion provider of cloud communications and infrastructure services. The companies announced their tie-up in May.

NWN Carousel says its Experience Management Platform (EMP) gives a business full visibility and control over the work-from-anywhere environment. It offers advanced analytics, reporting, a customer success center and security features.

NWN Carousel has technology expertise across unified communications and collaboration (UCC), secure infrastructure, data centers, networking and cloud solutions.

Andrew Gilman is NWN Carousel’s chief marketing officer.

NWN Carousel’s Andrew Gilman

“Over the last few months, a key focus are was to integrate and extend the capabilities of each organization into our new combined offerings portfolio and launching the NWN Carousel brand that leverages our strengths and positions us to deliver the best cloud communications services for our 7,000 customers in North America,” he said. “NWN Carousel provides integrated offerings that drive business outcomes for our public sector, commercial and enterprise customers.”

New Offering from Carousel

From Carousel, the company added a sixth offering around visual collaboration and intelligent offices, Gilman said. NWN Carousel saw an opportunity in audio/video to support its customers in their hybrid work agenda.

“Those customers are new to the NWN side,” he said. “The NWN unified communications offering leveraged Cisco, but Carousel also has a strong relationship with Avaya. The integrated approach extends our capabilities by bringing EMP as a management layer on top of all our six core offerings.”

NWN Carousel’s products and services are easy to buy, sell and use, Gilman said. That benefits NWN Carousel partners and helps customers deliver better business outcomes in today’s hybrid work environment.

More Opportunity in Hybrid Work

The combination provides significant growth, more resources, a larger customer base and greater opportunity in the $70 billion market in North America for the hybrid work transformation, Gilman said.

“We also can now deliver a breadth of offerings that can take organizations wherever they need to go to support employee and customer experience,” he said.

For the immediate future, NWN Carousel’s focus is engaging and supporting its combined customer base, Gilman said. It’s also telling customers how EMP can help accelerate their cloud communication priorities for the rest of 2021 into 2022.

Jim Sullivan is NWN Carousel’s CEO.

“The pandemic put many organizations in a challenging situation: an overnight shift from traditional offices to cloud-connected, distributed work environments,” he said. “Today, in only four months, we deliver on the promise of merging the two companies by offering the industry’s most complete mix of secure and effective cloud communications solutions to transform enterprises for the modern work-from-anywhere world.”

Cisco continues to lead Dell’Oro Group‘s SD-WAN leaderboard, as hardware-based solutions decline in popularity.

Dell’Oro recently posted its first-half market report, which showed the industry growing 39% over the halfway point last year. Cisco led Fortinet, VMware, Versa and HPE Aruba (Silver Peak) in the SD-WAN market. Those rankings remained the same from earlier this year, except that Fortinet leapfrogged from third to second over VMware.

Moreover, the top six vendors held more than 70% of market share, according to Dell’Oro.

Dell’Oro’s Shin Umeda

“Demand for SD-WAN solutions was robust in the first half of the year, sustaining the momentum we saw at the back end of last year,” said Shin Umeda, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. “The SD-WAN market continues to expand globally, and while all regions posted solid double-digit growth, uptake in Europe and Asia was especially strong.”

Analysis

The brief report pointed out significant trends in the market, particularly the movement to software-based products. Dell’Oro found that hardware-based access routers declined in the first half of 2021. The decline rate sat in the mid-single digits. This piece of data fits well with what industry experts have been saying. QOS Networks CEO Frank Cittadino, for example, told us last year that SD-WAN was moving to a cloud-based, user-focused, branchless model.

The forecast I put out for my team is, ‘Look, the branch was great up until this year.’ And we all kind of knew that users were going to leave the branch. This year, obviously with the events that are unfolding, we’ve changed our forecast,” Cittadino told Channel Futures.

In addition, Dell’Oro Group found that vendors are integrating more and more security features into their offerings.

According to Shin Umeda, Vice President and analyst, the SD-WAN market continues to expand globally, and while all regions posted solid double-digit growth, uptake in Europe and Asia was especially strong. Learn more: https://t.co/CAVOWHYZ0E#SDWAN

— Dell’Oro Group (@DellOroGroup) September 9, 2021

Check out the third Channel Futures 20 SD-WAN Providers You Should Know list.