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www.datto.co.uk 12 BUSINESS BRIEFING Cost savings Jon-Marc Wilkinson, WatchGuard Technologies Director of Sales, UK and Ireland, points out that WatchGuard Cloud has multiple benefits for partners, due to its simplicity and flexibility, and not least of which, significant cost savings “Because it is a cloud-driven solution, partners get our management platform along with the visualisation and reporting tools all via the cloud; there are big savings in infrastructure costs,” he says. “It also enables partners to drive cost efficiencies throughout their organisations by automating security tasks and automating operational tasks like licensing, onboarding and inventory management.” He adds “Not only does it help add to partners’ bottom line through cost savings and efficiency, but it enables them to easily grow their portfolio of security services.” “The majority of our partners will be firewall customers, but with the acquisition of Panda’s endpoint technologies, we now have a plethora of customers on that side as well. Having a Unified Security Platform makes it easy for partners to adopt our other technologies. This has the added benefit of significant cross sell opportunities.” he says. Adding security services WatchGuard Cloud and the WatchGuard product range doesn’t just have benefits for MSPs (existing and new). As Wilkinson points out, it can also help resellers that have not yet gone down the MSP route to meet growing customer demand for managed security services. “WatchGuard Cloud enables a reseller to become a security specialist on WatchGuard products and provide a managed services offering to their customers, giving them, steady, predictable and, most importantly, increasing revenues. Moreover, once those customers have Four into one will go The addition of endpoint security products to the WatchGuard Cloud management platform brings new opportunities for MSPs and resellers product; Panda Adaptive Defense is now WatchGuard EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response); and Panda Adaptive Defense 360 is now WatchGuard EPDR (Endpoint Protection Detection and Response). A complete offering With integrated Secure Wi-Fi capabilities as well, enabling partners to manage all WatchGuard security solutions, from the network to the endpoint, through the WatchGuard Unified Security Platform. This includes: 1 Endpoint Security – extensible solutions to stop breaches, data theft and cyber-attacks through advanced prevention, detection, containment and response. 2 Network Security – network security appliances, from tabletops to 1U rack- mounted units, and critical security services, such as IPS, URL filtering, Gateway AV, application control and antispam, plus services to combat advanced threats such as file sandboxing and DNS filtering. 3 Multi-Factor Authentication – an easy-to-use Cloud platform that requires users to supply information they know, with information provided on something they have, to positively identify a specific person. 4 Secure Wi-Fi – a variety of solutions for introducing secure Wi-Fi into a business, from wireless-enabled Firebox appliances to cloud-ready access points. The growth and integration of WatchGuard’s portfolio means that VARs and MSPs will be able to provide customers with complete protection, all managed via a single pane of glass. A little over two years ago, in April 2019, WatchGuard Technologies launched the WatchGuard Cloud platform as part of its mission to make cyber security simple for channel partners to deploy, configure and manage its products and services for our end-user customers. By centralising security management and reporting through a single interface, the cloud-hosted management platform simplifies how MSPs protect their customers while reducing infrastructure costs, accelerating customer acquisition and minimising time spent on reporting and operational tasks. Designed from the ground-up for MSPs, WatchGuard Cloud delivers true multi-tier, multi-tenant capabilities. This includes scaling automatically to allow MSPs to create and manage an unlimited number of customer accounts, deploy new WatchGuard appliances, manage and deploy WatchGuard applications, and gain valuable insights into a customer’s network. Endpoint integration Since launching its cloud management platform, WatchGuard has continued to develop WatchGuard Cloud in line with its evolving product portfolio, which now offers network security and intelligence, advanced endpoint protection, secure Wi- Fi and multi-factor authentication. In June, it took a big step forward with the integration into WatchGuard Cloud of the endpoint security products gained through its acquisition of Panda Security in 2020. Previously known as Panda Endpoint Protection and Panda Endpoint Protection Plus now comprise the WatchGuard EPP (Endpoint Protection Platform) Jon-Marc Wilkinson Tony Price