New Cybereason Americas Channel Chief Doubles Down On Health Care

Cybereason plans to recruit specialty health-care-focused partners to capitalize on their install base and industry knowledge in the highly competitive market.

The Boston-based cybersecurity vendor is looking to leverage the skills of health-care partners outside the typical reseller, systems integrator or MSSP realms, said Joe O'Donnell, vice president of Americas channel.

Adversaries are increasingly targeting health-care organizations because a successful breach can allow them to get their hands on Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, sales records and prescription records, O'Donnell said. Other verticals such as retail and manufacturing offer certain types of valuable records, but no industry matches health care as to the sheer breadth of sensitive data.

[Related: Rising Endpoint Security Star Cybereason Raises $200M, Eyes IPO]

"Everything you want to barter with is there," O'Donnell told CRN exclusively. "It seems like the best bank to rob."

O'Donnell started at Cybereason in June following nearly three years as senior director of cybersecurity solutions sales at platform security giant Palo Alto Networks. O'Donnell said he's built strong relationships with channel partners and customers from his 32 years in the industry,] and is knowledgeable across a wide range of security products.

Health-care executives are particularly skittish about building and running their own security program and are more likely to look to third parties to provide security services, O'Donnell said. As a result, O'Donnell said the health-care industry's interest in cybersecurity goes beyond just products to encompass services as well.

The specialty health-care channel would add to relationships that current Cybereason resellers or MSSPs already have with health-care organizations, O'Donnell said. The specialty players, though, benefit from their existing relationships with health-care executives thanks to already being part of the health-care system's daily operations and ecosystem, according to O'Donnell.

"They're already the trusted adviser in some capacity," O'Donnell said.

A technical integration with Cybereason would help specialty health-care partners differentiate themselves from competitors, according to O'Donnell. The API integration is relatively straightforward, O'Donnell said, but figuring out the most effective messaging, use cases, and outcomes to present to health-care organizations will be more challenging.

O'Donnell has grown Cybereason's Americas channel unit from three to 13 individuals over the past four months and said the company's new hires are skilled in going through, negotiating and discussing the business use case around Cybereason's offering with vendors and hospitals. The company plans to distill the benefits it can provide around patient safety and security into a technical offering, he said.

Existing Cybereason reseller and MSSP partners, meanwhile, will benefit from now having access to partner success managers who are laser-focused on improving the experience, O'Donnell said. Specifically, he said partners benefit from the intellectual property contained with company runbooks on managed defense and response (MDR) and running a Security Operations Center.

WWT formalized a relationship with Cybereason roughly five months ago after being impressed with the company's ability to take a complex process and put a nice front end on it so that it can be used by tech generalists, according to Matthew Berry, global principal solutions architect.

The Maryland Heights, Mo.-based company, No. 8 on the 2019 CRN Solution Provider 500, historically worked with network security OEMs, but over the past two years has branched out into other security competencies, Berry said. WWT customers have sought tools that provide robust detection and response capabilities without requiring lots of in-house security expertise or funding, Berry said.

WWT had a good rapport with O'Donnell from his time at Palo Alto Networks, and Berry said O'Donnell's arrival at Cybereason coupled with its embrace of a channel-only model made this the right time to strike up a relationship. Berry praised O'Donnell's experience working with large channel partners and end customers, and said he understands what's needed to bring value in the upper enterprise.

"They have some really good programs and ideas about how to partner with us," Berry said. "I feel great about Joe [O'Donnell] being at the helm of this."