What To Expect As A Tenable MSSP Partner

We live in an ever-evolving tech landscape. But with great innovations come high cybersecurity risks. So, what exactly can be done to not just identify threats but also offer solutions for them?

Greg Goetz, VP of global strategic partners for Tenable, joined CRNtv’s Jon Alba to take a dive into how scalability and centralization can actually be crucial in delivering a quality MSSP program, and how Tenable is playing a role in doing that.

Jon: How does the Tenable MSSP program enable managed security service providers (MSSPs) to actually deliver comprehensive and proactive security solutions to their customers?

Greg: I think that the way to think about Tenable and how we can drive managed security services is, think of us as the leader in preventative security. So, there's so much focus on the defensive side of things, MDR. At Tenable, we have a very strong belief that if you make your infrastructure, make your assets more secure, you'll greatly reduce the risk that you'll ever be breached. And so, we definitely think of ourselves as the leader in offensive or preventative security. And the companies really evolved from vulnerability management to full exposure management.

So, we can help our partners identify and manage cybersecurity risk across the entire modern attack surface. And we're pretty uniquely positioned to do so.

Jon: One of the biggest problems is that cybersecurity threats are constantly growing in their complexity. So how does Tenable's MSSP program empower partners to scale their services while also maintaining high levels of vulnerability management, and now, as you mentioned, exposure management, as well.

Greg: Yeah, just kind of picking up on that exposure management theme. I don't envy the role of a modern-day CISO. The amount of assets that they have to protect, it's just such a big challenge, but exposure management can absolutely help them do that. So, we give visibility across the entire tax surface. Whether that's traditional IT assets, OT, IOT assets, cloud assets, things like identity platforms, we can give a CISO (through our MSSP partners) a view of all those assets and what the associated cybersecurity risk is, how likely those assets are to be exploited. And so, this can help drive a really powerful and differentiated managed security service delivered by our partners.

The last thing I would say is I've got to give our research team a plug. I think the best in the industry, over 100 researchers strong. And they do things like everything from sourcing and discovering zero days. We discover more zero-day vulnerabilities than anyone else in the business, as well as they maintain our plugins. So, we've got over 225,000 plugins and these do everything from detect a traditional software vulnerability, or otherwise known as CVE, but also detect things like misconfigurations, like a port that's open that shouldn't be open. As an example, that's more detections for vulnerabilities than anyone else in the industry. So those are the things we bring to bear through our MSSP offering and program.

Jon: You mentioned some of the key differentiators for it. So how does it align with the evolving needs of businesses looking to outsource their cybersecurity management?

Greg: Yeah, so first and foremost, we continue to see a massive skills gap. So, there are 4 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs. And so, for us, Tenable as a company, we have more customers who are coming to us wanting Tenable One, our exposure management platform, but wanting a partner to implement and manage it.

And one of the first things I always point out to new partners is, Tenable does not provide any managed services, unlike some of our peers and competitors. And so, we really rely on our MSSP partner ecosystem to deliver those managed security services. And what we see is when we have an MSSP implement and manage the full Tenable stack, our exposure management platform, it leads to happier customers, much better outcomes.

So, this is a really important part of our business. And then our program itself, we are extremely partner-friendly. Our go-to-market strategy is 100 percent channel led. So, all transactions must go through a Tenable partner. And we compensate all of our sellers on every deal, regardless of whether or not it's MSSP. So, our MSSP partners should get nothing but support from our sellers that they're engaging with. You should rarely ever experience any kind of field conflict with us. And so, we've got a very partner-friendly go-to-market strategy.

For more on how to get involved with Tenable’s MSSP program, visit tenable.com/partners/mssp-partner-program.