Deep Instinct still on the hunt for MSSPs

Security player Deep Instinct has continued its push to recruit more managed security service providers (MSSPs) as it looks to widen its channel reach.

The vendor, which uses deep learning to identify threats before they become a major problem, indicated last spring that it wanted to work with more managed service players and get its offering in front of a greater number of customers as it challenged the established endpoint protection status quo.

Now, almost a year later, there has been progress and the message “come work with us” is still being sounded to the managed service community.

Sam Linford, VP channel and MSSP EMEA at Deep Instinct, said the interest had been strong and it had been onboarding partners as more started to understand the potential of the opportunity.

“What we’re seeing now is MSSPs starting to realise that their customers no longer want to pay an alert tax – most of these alerts are false positives,” he said.

“Customers are asking for a more attractive, quantifiable way to be charged. Deep learning has the ability to reduce the false positive down to 0.1%. Right now, the discussion is around helping an MSSP understand that they might need to look at changing the way in which they charge, but ultimately driving up their potential revenue streams.”

Those plans will be the same across the rest of the year as the firm continues to grow the channel side of the business.

“MSSP is a laser focus for us,” said Linford. “We’re driving into those MSSP businesses and changing that perception. But at the same time, we have also put importance on reselling our technology to much larger enterprise organisations that maybe have those security service or SOC service centres inside their business already and they prefer to manage the technology themselves.

“We are seeing some good revenue from the partners we have, but we’re still on a motivated drive to build out that channel much further and deeper and wider. We absolutely have got some work to do around that, but it’s definitely moving at quite a pace. We are adding people to our team constantly, from a channel perspective, so that we can support that activity, which I believe demonstrates the need for our technology within the channel.”

Deep Instinct is educating customers about the proposition and doing more to make sure the channel is up to speed on it.

The traditional endpoint detection and response approach is what the vendor is challenging, and hopes this will resonate with users and partners.

“You’ve got a huge number of MSPs that are already well established in the market today with endpoint security technologies like EDR [endpoint detection and response],” said Linford. “They have teams of threat-hunting and SOC individuals, analysts that go out there and look for the bad stuff, after something bad has happened. Right? Post execute. And that’s great.

“But you’ve got huge numbers of boutique partners and MSPs that are looking to get into security service and providing security on the endpoint. They have to make a decision at this point in time. Do they go down the route of what everyone else is already doing, or do they look at the more current types of technology from a prevention-first approach?”