SherWeb Urges Partners To Focus on Security in 2020

SherWeb is urging its partners to go after the managed security services opportunity aggressively in 2020.

The Sherbrooke, Quebec-based cloud distributor, one of the indirect providers in Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program, held its annual partner conference late last week in Montreal. SherWeb has thousands of partners who resell Microsoft and other cloud services through SherWeb as part of their primarily SMB-focused managed service provider (MSP) practices.

"We cannot emphasize enough how important and crucial security will be in our business," said Matthew Cassar, SherWeb's co-founder and co-CEO, in the main keynote at the SherWeb Accelerate Cloud Summit 2019.

"Managed service providers need to evolve into managed security service providers," Cassar said, adding that even MSPs who don't shift gears to security should at least offer holistic security as part of their services. According to SherWeb market research, about 90 percent of SMBs would switch service providers if they were provided a comprehensive security service.

Cassar and other SherWeb executives detailed several ways that they plan to help their MSP partners offer more effective security services to SMB customers, who are finding themselves targeted by attackers more frequently than they used to be when hacks focused more heavily on large multinationals.

For one thing, Cassar said SherWeb will be offering best-of-breed third-party security services that its partners can in turn offer to their customers. As a first component, SherWeb announced at the show that it is offering Bitdefender Antivirus.

"Bitdefender Antivirus is a key security product for any MSP to resell because it will help them detect threats more accurately than any other security product on the market," said Nicolas Roy, product manager for security at SherWeb, in a statement. "As part of our commitment to provide our partners with only the best business software in the world, we're proud to add Bitdefender to our portfolio."

A little further out, Cassar said SherWeb will be providing security operations center (SOC) services for its partners in the coming months.

Another way SherWeb plans to help its partners expand their security capabilities is by enhancing Office Protect, the company's simplicity-focused solution for locking down Office 365 deployments. The company first launched Office Protect at its 2018 conference, and the core purpose of the product remains intact, said Guillaume Boisvert, director of Office Protect for SherWeb. "We know that our value, our positioning is to be simple, to make it easy," Boisvert said. "A lot of security products, if I can send a million alerts, you can see that I'm useful. That is definitely not our approach."

Improvements for Office Protect on the roadmap include advanced reporting to cover compliance workloads. Additionally, plans call for Office Protect to handle more investigation and remediation of potential security incidents. "I don't want to tell you that we'll do the remediation for you. That's just a pipe dream," Boisvert said. "We're not looking to take the decision away from you. We're looking to accompany you through the investigation. We're going to provide you with the playbooks. [For example,] it's a sign-in from an unauthorized country. I got an alert in clear English. What's next?"

That is the type of issue for which Office Protect will recommend to the partner how to handle the customer's situation, he said.

In non-security developments, SherWeb announced that it will offer QuickBooks for its partners to resell. "This has been a high-demand product from our partners," Cassar said. Additionally, Cassar said that over the last year, existing partners had increased their subscription-based revenues by 30 percent and increased their average revenue per user (ARPU) by more than a third to $15.

Posted by Scott Bekker on October 15, 2019