
ConnectWise Finds A Target Investment: Perch Security
Bellini has spent more than a year carefully scouring the technology market for potential cybersecurity investments. His goal: Help all IT service providers to automate IT security for SMB customers, while ensuring that those partners won't have to make massive financial investments in SOC (security operation center) build outs. Bellini's research in the security market leverages a handful of trusted lieutenants within the halls of ConnectWise. That team has quietly met with a range of MSSP and cybersecurity companies over the past year. Perch has been on the company's radar for quite some time, and even attended a closed-door MSSP and CISO gathering that ConnectWise hosted in June, ChannelE2E has confirmed.Aligned with Perch and multiple endpoint security partners, ConnectWise is "building out a comprehensive strategy for technology solution providers to integrate Security-as-a-Service models into their business," the company said in a prepared statement about the investment.What Perch Security Offers to MSPs
Perch Security appears to align well with that mission. The company's cybersecurity services and products include:- Real-time threat detection, including east-west traffic
- Threat intelligence centralization and automation
- First-tier threat analysis to alleviate the burden for the service provider and users
- Access to view and participate in the process as much as desired via secure web application

"When you install ANY security tool, the end result will be alerts. Both MSPs and their customers do not have the time or resources to triage these alerts. Perch’s SOC triages the alerts, and escalates true positive incidents to the MSPs – with enough detail so that the MSP knows what to do with the incident. This dramatically reduces the MSP’s workload when dealing with the output of security solutions."
- Datto is taking a close look at the security market, CEO Austin McChord told ChannelE2E during IT Glue’s GlueCon conference in September 2018. If I had to guess, the company will layer more and more security into its networking equipment, potentially competing against SonicWall in the SMB sector.
- Continuum recently acquired CARVIR and has built outsourced SOC services for MSPs. CEO Michael George in September 2018 told MSPs to take the cybersecurity mountain during the Navigate 2018 conference in Boston.
- Kaseya also is looking at the security market for potential moves, CEO Fred Voccola told ChannelE2E at GlueCon. The company already has two important pieces of the puzzle — RapidFire Tools and AuthAnvil.
- SolarWinds MSP last month unveiled a Threat Monitoring Service Program at the company’s Empower MSP conference in Phoenix.
- Moreover, organizations such as Alien Vault, Arctic Wolf Networks and Infogressive have developed SOC-oriented strategies to assist MSPs as customers and partners.