Smarter Detection, Fewer Gaps: Rethinking Security at the Edge

Cyber threats aren’t staying in one lane anymore. They’re jumping across endpoints, identities, and cloud environments, making it harder for defenders to keep up. That’s where Vectra AI comes in. With its recent partnerships with CrowdStrike, Exabeam, and Zscaler, the company is embedding its AI agents deep into the stack to spot threats others might miss.

In this Q&A, Vectra AI's CTO Oliver Tavakoli unpacks how Vectra AI is evolving its platform and partner strategy, especially for MSPs, to help security teams detect faster, respond smarter, and stay ahead in today’s hybrid world.

MSSP Alert: Vectra AI’s partnerships with CrowdStrike, Exabeam, and Zscaler point to a deliberate effort to integrate across endpoint, identity, and cloud. What’s the strategy guiding these alliances and how do you decide where AI agents can add the most immediate value in partner environments?

Oliver: Our strategic alliances are driven by two factors: (a) the evolving nature of cyberattacks and (b) the presence of complementary products in our customer base. Attacks increasingly span multiple domains and rely on abusing gaps between siloed controls. To that end, we focus on aligning with partners that help complete the visibility puzzle across endpoint, identity, and cloud, and who are typically already present in our customer base. Vectra’s AI agents are designed to triage, stitch, and prioritize signal across domains in real time. We deploy them where we can extract unique behavioral insights or surface latent threats that might go undetected in a single domain. Our guiding principle is simple: we aim to reduce dwell time by enhancing signal clarity, especially at the seams of hybrid environments.

MSSP Alert: With Zscaler, you’re gaining deeper visibility into SASE traffic. How are Vectra’s AI agents improving detection and Zero Trust enforcement in those environments, especially for customers managing hybrid work and fragmented infrastructure?

Oliver: SASE architectures fundamentally change where and how traffic flows, which in turn creates visibility gaps in traditional network security models. Our expanded alliance with Zscaler addresses this challenge head-on. By ingesting SASE packet data, our AI agents can detect threats that manifest in those pathways, such as identity abuse, lateral movement, or command-and-control activity. In fact, with the ZIA and ZPA integrations now in place, Vectra AI provides better coverage than we could deliver when all work was performed in an office. For organizations with remote workforces or distributed infrastructure, this means they can adopt cloud-forward strategies without sacrificing threat detection fidelity. The resulting detections are contextualized with signals across the broader environment to speed our joint customers’ Zero Trust journey.

MSSP Alert: As Vectra AI embeds deeper into partner ecosystems, how are you thinking about interoperability, data fidelity, and ensuring detection outcomes stay consistent across varied architectures and multi-cloud setups?

Oliver: We design our platform to be domain-agnostic and resilient to environmental complexity. Whether a customer is operating across multiple cloud providers, legacy on-premise infrastructure, or a mix of both, our goal is to normalize signal and ensure AI-driven detections are precise and context-rich. The cybersecurity industry’s standardization of detection classification on MITRE ATT&CK TTPs allows for a level of abstraction that makes API interconnects less susceptible to breakage. And over time, we expect GenAI (and MCPs, in particular) to play a larger role in enabling interconnects, which are more resilient by interpreting natural language requests and passing them to their intended components within each product.

MSSP Alert: With GenAI advancing fast, on both sides of the threat landscape, how is your roadmap evolving to support risk-aware adoption, greater AI adaptability, and faster decision support in the SOC?

Oliver: GenAI is reshaping both attacker tooling and defender workflows. Our roadmap reflects this dual reality. We are embedding GenAI to elevate human decision-making – whether it’s through support for natural language queries, SOC copilots, or response strategies that don’t require customers to author playbooks. At the same time, we are innovating new detection capabilities to identify attackers’ attempts to leverage AI present in customer environments to further their goals. This may include the abuse of existing AI copilots as well as homegrown applications that expose customers to a new class of application security vulnerabilities. Our approach emphasizes guardrails over hype: helping customers adopt GenAI securely while making SOC operations more efficient in a way that is auditable and aligned with their risk appetite.

MSSP Alert: For MSPs serving SMB and midmarket segments, how is Vectra AI shaping its AI agent portfolio and partner programs to help them deliver scalable, outcome-focused detection and response services?

Oliver: We understand that many MSPs operate with lean security teams and serve customers with limited in-house expertise. That’s why we’ve designed our AI agents to be autonomous, high-fidelity, and easy to operationalize. Our Clarity Program for MSSPs formalizes this commitment—providing flexible licensing, white-label options, and training tailored to MSP delivery models. By integrating with platforms like CrowdStrike, we also empower MSP partners to deliver comprehensive threat detection services without needing to stitch together multiple products themselves. 6. How does the Vectra AI Platform support MSPs with multi-tenant needs especially around reporting, operational efficiency, and managing a wide range of customer environments at scale? Multi-tenancy is not a bolt-on feature – it is a foundational requirement for our MSP partners. The Vectra AI Platform provides granular tenant isolation while enabling centralized management, cross-customer threat correlation, and consistent enforcement of service-level standards. Automated reporting, role-based access, and shared intelligence across tenants allow partners to maintain operational efficiency while delivering bespoke services. Our platform was built to help partners scale – without compromising on the depth or precision of detection.