General Atlantic’s Gary Reiner On Why ThreatLocker Is A Ransomware Killer And MSPs Are ‘Incredibly Strategic’

ThreatLocker’s Whitelisting And Ring-Fencing Advantage

ThreatLocker’s innovative whitelisting and ring-fencing technology is shutting down ransomware threats that have been battering MSPs, said Gary Reiner, operating partner at General Atlantic, which just led a $100 million Series C investment in ThreatLocker.

“We spoke to probably 15 MSPs in the course of doing our due diligence,” said Reiner, a former superstar CIO at GE who is now a board member at Citigroup and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, among other companies. “Every single one of them loves what ThreatLocker is doing for them. The majority of them had experienced ransomware with their customers prior to deploying ThreatLocker, even with the use of traditional EDR [endpoint detection response] software. ThreatLocker basically makes it impossible [for ransomware to infect businesses] because the only thing that is allowed to run in that environment is what has been previously approved by the customer. By doing that, there is no malware that can be installed or run in a customer’s environment. It just can’t happen.”

ThreatLocker has delivered a “default deny” software offering that does not impose an administrative burden on MSPs or SMB customers, said Reiner, who has also played a key role in General Atlantic’s funding of MSP software standouts Atera and JumpCloud.

“There has been resistance in the past to whitelisting by large companies because it was perceived to be an administrative burden. What [ThreatLocker co-founder and CEO] Danny [Jenkins] has done is figured out the art of making this incredibly effective with a massively reduced administrative burden of managing default deny,” he said. “The way they have done that is, No. 1, they have built great intelligence in their software that understands, for example, when an application has been upgraded. Therefore, they will not deny that application because it has been appropriately upgraded.”

Reiner said the future of MSPs is bright given the “incredibly strategic” role they are playing in protecting small- and midsize-business customers from cyberthreats.

“We’re seeing the MSP industry evolve to much less of a reseller of software and much more of an outsourced IT shop for SMBs,” he said. “With that it becomes very important that they select the right solution that protects their SMBs. We believe that, for example, ransomware is one of the single biggest threats to SMBs, and we believe that with MSPs deploying ThreatLocker with their customers that risk goes way down.”