SKOUT Deploys SOC-As-A-Service, Work From Home Bundle For MSPs

‘MSPs are ... holding our economy together. Period. The future of our economy, the stock market, small business jobs, it all depends on whether the IT community can take everyone remote and get everyone working effectively,’ says James Hatzell, SKOUT’s director of marketing.

Cybersecurity startup SKOUT had planned to roll out its partner plan at the beginning of the month, then had to quickly pivot to not only get its sales motion in line with broader economic uncertainties, but also to create relevant bundles for partners as their customers were quickly shifting workforces to home offices.

“Right now, the MSPs are really supporting our health care system as we go into crisis,” said James Hatzell, the firm’s marketing director. “They’re holding our economy together. Period. The future of our economy, the stock market, small business jobs, it all depends on whether the IT community can take everyone remote and get everyone working effectively.”

Melville, N.Y.-based SKOUT -- which offers 24-hour a day, seven-day-a-week SOC-as-a-service, as well as endpoint detection and email security sold on a per-seat basis, exclusively through the channel – said it spun off one of its products into a remote work bundle that is easily deployed in home office environments. The product is geared towards stopping business email compromise and ransomware.

“We took our log monitoring product and carved it out into an Office 365 alone, security product,” Hatzell said. “ So that way, MSPs have a lower cost of entry to protect their end users. We took that and our two other endpoint protection and email protection services, and created a work from home security bundle that we’ve been deploying.”

The offer comes with constant monitoring by SKOUT’s U.S.-based Security Operations Center (SOC), which is still running through the crisis. Given the environment, Hatzell said any product that falls under its work from home bundles does not require the usual one-year commitment.

“At first every one was in chaos, every MSP was taking everyone remote and the people who did have time to talk were interested, but they were like ‘Let me get things settled.’ Now its been a week since the chaos and everyone has solved their VPN problem, they’ve solved the remote connection problems and make it through the help desk tickets and everyone started to take security a lot more seriously,” Hatzell said. “We know this is going to fluctuate up and down. So that was a change we did right away.”

For the last several months, SKOUT has been at work on its sales and training enablement programs which it plans to use to help MSPs grow a security business. The company’s multi-tiered partner plan gives better margins to partners who move through its program by offering additional discounts based on higher sales. The company’s partner program is also providing co-branded marketing material, lead generation, go-to-market planning, and deal registration. SKOUT said partner tiers are calculated in real-time, as soon as revenue is booked, so there is no waiting for a new year or new quarter to have discounts applied.

To help its own channel navigate the pandemic, SKOUT said it created relevant content to help partners and their customers.

“We reached out to all of our partners, and we created co-branded materials like a remote working check list, social media images, some resources they could use for technical resources and marketing resources,” Hatzell said.

He said SKOUT’s SOC has been tracking threats to health care IT infrastructure and seen bad actors intent on sewing disruption, even in an environment where everyone is at risk.

“It’s so sickening that it is happening,” Hatzell said. “But the health care systems are under attack more than they ever have been because people are willing to pay. We saw a hospital in the Czech Republic get attacked. We saw the U.S. Department of Health was attacked, and we saw a testing lab get attacked. That was all when everything was unraveling.”