28 01732 759725 MANAGED SERVICES Cato Networks is making it easier for channel partners to profit from managed SASE services with the launch of the new Cato Managed SASE Partner Platform partner. Sometimes the partner does a small amount and we will sit behind the partner and help them to do that.” He adds that managed services come in various forms and that Cato can accommodate the preferences of the customer and the partner. “You can split managed services into two things. There’s what one might call the ‘as-a-service’ model, where you buy SASE from Cato, it’s in the cloud and we do behind the scenes security research. We look at the CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) that get created whenever a new vulnerability is found, we work out how to fix it and we roll out patches. You could see that as a managed service. We call it ‘as a service’. It doesn’t involve a person at the end of a phone wearing a headset talking to a customer, which is what we would typically see as a managed service, but it’s still service-related. We will always do that, and we do that for everybody. It’s what makes us attractive to customers and to partners. “A good example of a managed service for SASE might be a partner that’s coming from networking and hasn’t got much security expertise. They can do the managed service that they normally offer for networking, but if they don’t have many skills in security yet, they might elect to sell Cato’s managed XDR service and then our help desk would sit behind the scenes. They do that on a customer-by-customer basis. If they decide to introduce their own managed service support desk for security, they can sell those services to new customers before turning ours off and moving to their own. “Managed services are the arms and legs, the people and the skills of the people that sit behind a service on a help desk or a professional services engineer or designer, people like that. One third of the time managed services are delivered by a managed service provider and two thirds of the time they are provided by Cato direct. But we are not here to manage services at partners’ expense; we’re here to help partners do it themselves. That’s our aim.” Growing appetite Duffy believes it is in a partner’s interest to be able to offer managed SASE services because, although the aim of SASE is to make things simpler, as businesses merge networking and security they will inevitably end up doing more and there will be more that can go wrong, which is increasing the appetite to buy a managed service rather than to manage SASE in-house. “Certainly, the interest we’re seeing from partners indicates a growing appetite for customers to buy managed services. We’re seeing partners who would typically have been viewed as a VAR expressing an interest in getting into managed services now.” He adds that SASE managed services have the potential to expand the market for SASE and build on SASE’s existing appeal for medium-sized businesses, which is where Cato Networks has made its mark. “SASE opens the technology up to more businesses if it’s done right, if it’s done in the cloud as a single platform, because it simplifies things and allows businesses to make a strategic decision to move to a new networking and security platform and to implement that over time. You don’t have to buy and implement everything in one go, which is one of the great joys of SASE. “SASE has made it easier for smaller businesses in the first place, and managed SASE services inevitably make it even easier for smaller businesses to move into networking and security. It’s often security that’s the driver for these things because of increased concern about security attacks and the difficulty of finding and paying for security personnel and being confident that you’ve done everything you need to do. It’s much more palatable to give the job to somebody who already has the staff, who’s already paid for the staff, who’s taking the risk, who’s doing it at scale and who has expertise in this area rather than for an end customer to take the risk and have the cash flow issue of trying to hire people who are expensive and then trying to keep them and having that very lonely existence of being up Cato Networks, the 2024 Technology Reseller Cyber Security Vendor of the Year, is making it quicker and easier for channel partners to profit from managed SASE services with the launch of the new Cato Managed SASE Partner Platform. The platform builds on the benefits of the Cato SASE Cloud by providing a range of tools that enable channel partners to manage customers and services via a centralised multi-tenant partner dashboard (see box). The introduction of the Cato Managed SASE Partner Platform comes at a time of growing demand for managed network and security services. Gartner predicts that by 2026, at least 45% of enterprises will use managed SASE services, three times more than in early 20231. Currently, one-third of Cato SASE Cloud deployments are provided as a managed service and Cato Networks Product Marketing Director Greg Duffy told Technology Reseller that Cato was eager to increase the number of partners offering managed services and to deepen their involvement in the delivery of those services. “In around 30% of cases the partner offers their own managed services. If the partner does not offer a managed service and is just reselling, typically the end customer will provide self-management but with Cato support. We have a support desk that they will avail themselves of if they’re not getting support from the A helping hand Greg Duffy 1 Gartner Research, ‘How to Choose Between Managed SASE Services’, Bjarne Munch, Craig Lawson, April 25, 2023.
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