Monday Morning Impact – August 30

IDC: More Than One-Third of Organizations Have Experienced Ransomware Attack

A new survey by IDC has found that more than one third of organizations worldwide have experienced a ransomware attack or breach that blocked access to systems or data in the previous 12 months. And for those that fell victim to ransomware, it is not uncommon to have experienced multiple ransomware events.

“Ransomware has become the enemy of the day; the threat that was first feared on Pennsylvania Avenue and subsequently detested on Wall Street is now the topic of conversation on Main Street,” said Frank Dickson, program vice president of Cybersecurity Products at IDC. “As the greed of cybermiscreants has been fed, ransomware has evolved in sophistication, moving laterally, elevating privileges, actively evading detection, exfiltrating data, and leveraging multifaceted extortion.”

According to the research, the incident rate was notably lower for companies based in the United States (7%) compared to the worldwide rate (37%).

The Manufacturing and Finance industries reported the highest ransomware incident rates while the Transportation, Communication, and Utilities/Media industries reported the lowest rates.

Only 13% of organizations reported experiencing a ransomware attack/breach and not paying a ransom.

While the average ransom payment was almost a quarter million dollars, a few large ransom payments (more than $1 million) skewed the average.

Organizations that are further along in their digital transformation (DX) efforts were less likely to have experienced a ransomware event. These are organizations that have committed to a long-term DX investment plan with a multi-year approach tied to enterprise strategy.

The report, “IDC’s 2021 Ransomware Study: Where You Are Matters!” presents findings from a survey of nearly 800 IT decision makers and influencers in July 2021.

Channel Impact^®
Companies should contact their channel partners to discuss a wide variety of preventative and remedial efforts such as reviewing and certifying security and data protection/recovery practices; performing stress tests; testing cyber response procedures; and increased sharing of threat intelligence with other organizations and/or government agencies.

AT&T Cybersecurity Updates MSSP Partner Program

In an effort to better serve the MSSP community, AT&T Cybersecurity has launched a simplified partner program intended to help MSSPs monetize security capabilities and achieve higher levels of growth and profits.

Updated benefits include consistent pricing with competitive price books and flat renewals. Partners can sell the complete Unified Security Management SKU set, and gain access to price books for all currencies that are valid for the length of the contract. Flat renewals have been designed into the strategy to help partners maintain consistent margins. Pricing will not increase at the time of renewal for existing customers, and if the contract price has gone down, the partner will be given the lower price, according to the company.

MSSPs will also receive 24/7 support, as well as a resource center equipped with sales collateral and co-marketing content to help generate leads. A channel account manager, enablement kits, marketing funds, and deal registration are also included.

“The cybersecurity landscape is a challenging space, and its constant evolution makes it difficult to keep up with the latest techniques and threats,” the company said in a blog post. “To stay ahead of the curve, we continue making improvements to our award-winning USM solutions, helping to enable the best possible security outcomes for your customers. USM Anywhere also receives the latest threat intelligence automatically from the AT&T Alien Labs research team, allowing businesses to stay ahead of emerging and evolving threats, without having to conduct their own security research.”

Channel Impact^®
First launched in 2014, the program addresses a subset of the channel that is too often overlooked by vendors and service providers.

Tigera Launches Partner Program to Address Security, Containers, Kubernetes and Microservices

Tigera, a San Francisco-based Kubernetes security and observability company, has launched a worldwide partner program aimed at solution provider resellers, systems integrators, consultants, and distributors that have competencies in AWS, Azure, GKE, Red Hat Openshift, and Suse Rancher Kubernetes, who also have practices related to DevOps, microservices, networking, and security.

Tigera will provide partners with sales leads, incentives, technical assistance, and product education. Partners can register deals and receive compensation for referral sales as well.

“We want to help partners evolve their offerings to capitalize on the growth of containers, Kubernetes, and microservices opportunities in order to grow their business and expand their value to customers,” said Amit Gupta, vice president of business development and product management at Tigera. “Now, we’re formalizing what has been an ad hoc network of partners as we see increasing inbound activity from partners of all types.”

Tigera’s Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise provide automated capabilities that can be used to secure, observe, and resolve performance issues and troubleshoot microservices. The offering provides a single pane of glass across multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes environments to deploy a standard set of egress access controls, enforce security policies for compliance, and observe and troubleshoot applications.

The company’s client list includes AT&T, Discover, Merck, ServiceNow, HanseMerkur, RealPage, L3Harris, and Mindbody.

Channel Impact^®
The partner program is intended to open doors for technology, services, and solution providers to build stronger relationships with their customers, expand their portfolios, and boost margins by building their expertise and ability to offer security and observability solutions for containers, Kubernetes, and microservices deployments.