Monday Morning Impact – September 28

Report: Pandemic Reveals Cybersecurity Gaps

A new study shows that organizations continue to struggle to protect their data and infrastructure against the new challenges of the remote work landscape.

The newly released Acronis Cyber Readiness Report takes a close look at how prepared organizations were to adapt to the pandemic’s impact on their IT operations and cybersecurity posture. Acronis, a Swiss-based company specializing in backup, disaster recovery, secure file access, sync and share, and partitioning software, surveyed 3,400 companies and remote workers from around the world during June and July 2020.

The report says that 92% of surveyed companies needed to adopt new technologies to enable remote work, including workplace collaboration tools, privacy solutions, and endpoint cybersecurity. Hackers targeting remote workers most frequently leveraged phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS), and videoconferencing attacks among their most common tactics used.

Malware attacks, such as ransomware, also have increased during the pandemic, with half of all surveyed companies reporting they are targeted at least once a week. This includes small companies as well as large ones. More than 30% of responding companies said they are attacked by malware every day, and 39% of companies experienced videoconferencing attacks in the past three months.

“The cyberthreat landscape has changed dramatically during the past few years, and in the last six months in particular,” said Serguei “SB” Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis. “Organizations that modernize their stack with integrated data protection and cybersecurity not only gain greater security, they lower their costs and improve efficiencies.”

Channel Impact^®
As businesses around the world reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, many had to address new risks to their infrastructure, endpoints, and mission-critical data. The shift to remote work alone introduced a range of new challenges – from closing security gaps with new technology to educating now-remote employees to avoid phishing attacks to strengthening the protection of third-party apps needed to work from home.

OneLogin Introduces Updated Partner Program

OneLogin, a San Francisco-based identity and access management company, has rolled out Accelerate 2.0, the next evolution of its partner program. The new program introduces partner tiering, allowing OneLogin to segment its ecosystem and reward the partners that invest with them and deliver results.

Benefits include co-brandable marketing collateral, kits and email campaign tools; tools and resources to drive go-to-market activities including sales guides, battle cards, decks and recorded sessions; deal registration; and training/certification.

“From its inception, the goal of Accelerate was to create and support a partner ecosystem that can fuel OneLogin’s growth trajectory. This enhancement moves us further towards this goal,” said Matt Hurley VP Global Channel, Distribution, OEM and Strategic Alliances at OneLogin. “It’s very important for us to continue up-leveling our investment in our partners and invest and reward partners that invest in us. This build-out deepens our training programs, introduces AI Deal Sourcing along with extensive sales and marketing tools that will continue to fuel growth for our company and our partners.”

The company claims more than 2,500 customers worldwide, including Airbus, Stitch Fix and AAA.

Channel Impact^®
With the updated program channel partners expect to grow their business and expand technical capabilities to better serve the needs of their customers. The company has expressed a firm commitment to training certifications for partners with specializations in sales, technical and delivery of OneLogin products.

PacketFabric and Avant Announce Strategic Partnership

PacketFabric, a Culver City, California-based Network-as-a-Service company, and Avant Communications, a Chicago-based master agent, have announced a strategic partnership for the distribution of PacketFabric’s services through Avant’s network of sub-agents.

PacketFabric’s SDN platform is a private Layer 2 NaaS that delivers secure connectivity at speeds from 50Mbps to multi-100Gbps. The company claims real-time connectivity between more than 170 premier colocation facilities across 26 global markets.

“The Avant partnership is significant because it’s the first time select master agents have the opportunity to take PacketFabric to market,” said Dave Ward, PacketFabric CEO. “Avant is a leader in selling the most innovative technology solutions to the enterprise, and we’re excited to accelerate sales of our Network as a Service (NaaS) platform through their best-in-class master agents and Pathfinder app.”

The partnership also supports proprietary market research via Avant Analytics to influence IT decision-making for enterprise customers.

“This partnership with PacketFabric represents our dedication to providing value and innovative solutions to our customer base of leading enterprise customers,” said Drew Lydecker, president of Avant. “We chose PacketFabric because of their superior technology and reputation in the telecom marketplace.”

“The consultant partner model is the leading driver of sales for innovative technology companies and Avant’s agents will be the best evangelists for the PacketFabric platform as they preach about why NaaS is the future of networking,” added Ward.

Channel Impact^®
Avant-aligned agents will be able to reduce their reliance on the public Internet and achieve greater control over how they move their data.