OpenText To Add ‘Missing’ Piece To Cybersecurity Platform With MDR Debut

With managed detection and response (MDR) from OpenText, ‘someone can take action when we’re asleep. That’s when MDR becomes very desirable for an MSP or MSSP,’ an OpenText partner tells CRN.

OpenText next week will debut its new managed detection and response (MDR) offering in what one MSP partner called a crucial piece for rounding out the vendor’s broad cybersecurity platform.

While OpenText has amassed a comprehensive array of security tools on its platform in recent years, MDR “was a component that was missing from the OpenText stack,” said Caesar Avila, founder and CIO of AVLA, a longtime OpenText partner based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I think that’s going to be a great addition.”

The general availability launch of OpenText MDR within the vendor’s Secure Cloud platform is planned for Monday, the company told CRN. The offering will provide partners with a 24/7 Security Operations Center service featuring more than 400 integrations to other security tools, including third-party products, executives said.

OpenText MDR is based upon OpenText’s acquisition of the Pillr platform from solution and service provider Novacoast in May.

Pillr was a “fantastic fit” in part thanks to their preexisting integrations with both OpenText and third-party tools, said Scott Richards, senior vice president for the AI and cybersecurity business units at OpenText.

“We were able to very quickly slip that into our strategy,” Richards said.

With the addition to Secure Cloud, partners will now be able to purchase and manage MDR alongside other OpenText tools “in this new, very modern user interface and dashboard system,” he said.

The OpenText Secure Cloud portfolio offers a wide array of security capabilities leveraging a series of acquisitions in recent years. The platform includes security and threat intelligence from Webroot as well as data protection from Carbonite and capabilities from email encryption provider Zix and security software vendor AppRiver.

At OpenText partner AVLA, the company has found major benefits from the moves by OpenText in recent years to fuse numerous security tools onto a single platform, Avila said.

“They’ve been bringing together a lot of other security tools that we were using from somewhere else. MDR was one of those components we were all asking for,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, we're getting it from somewhere else — why don’t you guys make the investment?’ Which they did. So we’re very excited about that.”

A 24/7 MDR offering is particularly crucial for solution and service providers to leverage in the current threat environment, Avila told CRN.

“It’s about having a team behind [us] — that when the problem is detected, there is a reaction to it. Someone can take action when we’re asleep,” he said. “That’s when MDR becomes very desirable for an MSP or MSSP.”

The forthcoming MDR launch comes after OpenText announced its enhanced Secure Cloud platform in October, which the company said was aimed at bolstering efficiency and growth opportunities for the vendor’s 18,000 MSP partners. Key enhancements included simplification of certain workflows, automation of more tasks and new integrations, as well as a user interface overhaul.

XDR On The Roadmap

Looking ahead, OpenText is also planning to move into XDR (extended detection and response) for correlating threat signals beyond endpoints to include other devices and IT environments, executives said.

Since OpenText already covers much of the cybersecurity spectrum when it comes to capabilities, “that gives us an advantage when it comes to XDR,” Richards said.

At the same time, OpenText fully intends to bring an “open architecture” approach to XDR that will integrate with third-party products, he noted.

“We’re willing to ingest data from any source out there,” Richards said.

And OpenText “absolutely” expects to bring more of its future XDR capabilities underneath a managed option as it’s now doing with MDR, said Simon Tiku, vice president for engineering and product management at OpenText.

Crucially, this will mean offering XDR that can accommodate not just the needs of enterprise customers but also SMBs, which are frequently under-served by the security industry, Tiku said.

OpenText, he said, is ultimately aiming to have “a consolidated, single solution for both the enterprise and SMBs.”