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Guardz’s Ultimate Plan Gives MSPs, MSSPs More AI, SentinelOne EDR

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When Guardz announced last year that it was partnering with SentinelOne, the benefits to both companies were obvious.

Guardz, which offers MSPs and MSSPs an AI-driven unified platform that provides what they need to deliver cybersecurity protections to small and midsize businesses, could now integrate capabilities from the larger cybersecurity vendor into the platform.

For its part, SentinelOne opened an avenue to expand its presence among SMBs, which face many of the same security challenges that enterprises do but without the budget or expertise their larger brethren. Through Guardz and its MSP and MSSP partners, SentinelOne had more running room in an increasingly important market.

The Ultimate Plan

This week, Guardz unveiled the Ultimate Plan for MSPs, which is a combination of SentinelOne’s endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology and Guardz’s unified platform with managed detection and response (MDR) added in, giving the two-year-old Israeli startup a full managed security service.

“Guardz partnered with SentinelOne to bring real-time active endpoint protection directly into the Guardz platform,” Tal Eisner, vice president of product marketing for the company, told MSSP Alert. “This ensures users benefit from advanced threat detection and response seamlessly consolidated across their endpoints. Within it, AI plays a pivotal role in unifying and automating security operations.”

This gives MSPs and MSSPs the tools needed to bring scalable protection to their SMB customers and to manage an increasingly complex cybersecurity environment that includes multiple point solutions, Eisner said.

A Single Platform for All Tools

That’s a key problem the offering is addressing. In a survey last of 260 MSPs last year, Guardz found that 77% said they managed four to 10 point solutions for their SMB clients, with 12% managing more than 10.

“The role of an MSP in today’s digital-first, remote-working world has become increasingly difficult,” Eisner wrote in a column at the time. “SMBs often rely on MSPs to manage their cybersecurity needs since they lack the internal expertise and resources to protect themselves effectively. However, for MSPs, this responsibility comes with its own set of hurdles, particularly the need to juggle multiple cybersecurity solutions at once.”

With the Ultimate Plan, MSPs and MSSPs gets a single platform that includes all their tools and eliminates the need for multiple dashboards, AI-powered automation and managed services that makes scaling their capabilities easier, and more advanced and affordable protection.

AI an Important Security Feature

AI is increasingly becoming a key tool for corporate security teams and MSSPs and MSPs, making security more automated, adaptive, and responsive, Eisner said. Guardz’s platform integrates threat intelligence from sources like users, cloud applications, emails, and devices for real-time monitoring and remediation and includes SentinelOne’s endpoint protection.

“Its AI connects the dots across these various attack vectors and provides actionable, user-centric security insights,” he said. “By detecting and analyzing anomalies in user activity patterns that might go unnoticed by the human eye, it warns MSPs about suspicious activity before it becomes a full-blown attack, allowing them to strengthen defenses proactively.”

He added that for MSPs and MSSPs, AI simplifies the management of complex, multi-layered security environments through this automation. They can protect the operations of their clients and scale their own operations without being overrun by alerts and manual tasks.

Security Data Reduction is Key

In its survey last year, Guardz said that 47% of MSPs are overwhelmed by the volume of security data they need to process every day. With so much volume, cybersecurity pros can be hit with what the company called “alert fatigue,” the point when they get so much data that they’re desensitized to it.

Vectra AI, in its annual State of Threat Detection report, chronicles the struggle security operation center (SOC) teams face. In a recent report, the AI-based cybersecurity company found that security analysts get an average of more than 4,000 alerts a day and spend 32% of their time on alerts that aren’t a threat.

In addition, 89% of SOC teams plan to use replace threat detection and response solutions with more AI-powered tools over the next year, according to the company. 

Guardz’s Eisner said such a shift makes sense.

“In short, AI makes it possible to secure more clients effectively while reducing the strain on resources,” he said. “It also enables them to scale more easily, as they can automate repetitive tasks and certain security actions, enabling them to focus their attention elsewhere.”

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