Like many cybersecurity vendors, central to our success has been our Partnership Program, which we built and customized to accelerate adoption of our advanced phishing threat protection platform among mid-market businesses and enterprises around the world. However, what’s unique about our reseller program is that it serves as much more than a source for recurring revenue; it actually helps the platform become smarter and more efficient.
Here’s how: the more users our resellers help us onboard, the more emails the platform can analyze; the more advanced phishing threats it can prevent, detect and respond to. That’s a primary benefit of an email security platform that is built on machine learning technology – the more it experiences, the smarter it gets. This ability to continuously learn and adapt to new phishing threats often serves as another incentive for our partners to resell the platform, as the more users they help bring in, the better the platform will perform. And less phishing attacks to deal with certainly equates to happy customers!
One of our main resellers is Champion Solutions Group. Headquartered in Florida and with offices around the U.S., Champion Solution Group provides IT solutions for companies across various industries. With regards to email security, the company focuses on message operations within the Microsoft Office suite, which includes Office365. We spoke with Chris Pyle, Champion’s President & CEO, on how IRONSCALES anti-phishing platform has benefited existing customers, how its benefits are being received by prospects, and how its helped Champion Solutions Group bolster its email security offerings.
For our reader’s reference, about how cyber-savvy are your customers?
In truth, some of them are quite savvy and some of them aren’t. A few of our customers have CISOs and dedicated security people and others don’t. IRONSCALES’ is great because the platform is comprehensive of all email security needs, and it’s deployable no matter the level of expertise or number of dedicated IT security personnel that work for or with an organization.
When talking about security, what are some of the biggest challenges your company is tasked to help solve?
We work on everything from managed security information and event management (SIEM) and application security to identity access control, patch management and of course, email security. We also frequently perform penetration testing and file systems management. Our work always depends on what client’s biggest vulnerabilities are. In recent years, we recognized that email phishing emerged as a larger challenge for customers. It all started about 24 months ago when several customers reported receiving sophisticated phishing emails designed to look as if they were sent from another department in their respective companies – usually accounting. Since then, the phishing problem has gone from bad to worse, and the security provided by our customer’s email clients are not keeping these persistent and sophisticated threats under control.
When reselling IRONSCALES, what do you position as the platform’s greatest competitive advantages?
Most of the other email security products and services simply “alert” users about a threat. The IRONSCALES platform actually does something about those threats – it is not just a passive monitoring or education tool – it’s an incident response partner. For our customers, the fact that the platform can actually remediate attacks in real-time with little to no support from an in-house security team is a major advantage. Additionally, we often highlight that the platform is built on machine learning and human input working together so that it continuously gets smarter the more that it comes into contact with phishing attacks – whether those attacks are identified by humans or technology is irrelevant.
This concept of continued learning provides a sense of comfort for customers knowing that as attacks evolve, so too will the IRONSCALES platform. This is something that Office365 Advanced Threat Protection has not been able to do. Finally, once we demo the product and walk through the different modules, customers are impressed by its ease-of-use and its ability to detect malicious emails at both the gateway and inside the mailbox itself.
How has Champions Solution Group as an organization benefited from the partner program? Has it bolstered your email security deployments?
When we showcase the platform, customers are quite surprised to see the number of attacks that are targeting their organization. They quickly discover that no one really listened to the trainings on phishing threats, and even if they had, a lot of the attacks would still be hard or even impossible to identify. IRONSCALES simulations make threats very convincible, and even the most confident companies discover that they are not secure. As such, IRONSCALES has really helped us round-out our email security offerings because the platform empowers our customers to become more aggressive at mitigating phishing threats.
For Champion in particular, the reseller program has enabled us to have more of a partnership with customers, rather than just act as another IT vendor on their procurement roster. Ultimately, we can bring cost-effective, applicable tools to help with their complex security needs, and boost our margins at the same time. Since beginning to resell the IRONSCALES platform, we have been able to elevate ourselves as trusted email security advisors while becoming more valuable security partners. Today more than 90 percent of all cyberattacks begin with email phishing, and the fact that we are able to resell a platform that is on the cutting edge of phishing mitigation is an invaluable benefit.
Interested in becoming a partner? Leverage our expert knowledge and take advantage of our sales and marketing support. Our partners receive pre-qualified leads, sales tools and an active and engaged partner that wants to work with you. Check out our Partnership Program to learn more and get your customers onto our advanced phishing threat protection platform today!