Nerdio Exec Touts CIS Relationship As ‘A Pretty Significant Step Forward’

'You'll be able to choose from hundreds and thousands of pre-configured policies that you'll be able to simply deploy,' Nerdio CRO Joseph Landes says.

Microsoft cloud products management tools vendor Nerdio continues to grow the security capabilities of its offerings, with Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder Joseph Landes hinting at future benefits to come for users thanks to his company’s strategic partnership with the Center for Internet Security.

Landes told a room of users of the Chicago-based vendor’s tools and solution providers curious about Nerdio that the company’s relationship with CIS–the East Greenbush, N.Y.-based nonprofit responsible for the CIS Critical Security Controls and CIS Benchmarks best practices for securing IT systems and data–calling it “a pretty significant step forward” for the security side of its Nerdio Manager for MSP and Manager for Enterprise offerings.

“If you want to actually deploy these policies today, if you're not using Nerdio Manager, you'd have to figure out what the policies are,” Landes said during CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange NexGen 2024 event. “You'd have to leave whatever device you're using. You'd have to download them. You’d have to configure them. With the Nerdio new relationship with CIS, you'll be able to choose from hundreds and thousands of pre-configured policies that you'll be able to simply deploy and use just with the click of a button.”

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Nerdio CIS Integration

Marcial Velez, CEO of New York-based Nerdio user Xperteks Computer Consultancy–a memberof CRN’s The 2024 MSP 500–told CRN in an interview that the vendor landing partnerships with the likes of CIS helps to improve their products.

“Nerdio is the ultimate cloud management platform tool that you would need to be able to successfully navigate managing AVD and Azure desktops and Azure servers,” he said. “What they're doing now, I think it's very exciting.”

Although Landes was light on the details of the future for the Nerdio-CIS partnership, for now, Nerdio partners and users have CIS Hardened Images integrated in Nerdio products, according to Nerdio.

The integration aims to enhance cybersecurity postures without extensive customization and manual configuration. Nerdio users can deploy virtual desktops and applications on pre-hardened, secure images and use automation capabilities within Nerdio Manager for MSP and Manager for Enterprise. Hardened Images allows for hardened virtual machine (VM) images for about $0.0225 per compute hour.

The two organizations also collaborated on CIS’ first Windows 10 and Windows 11 multisession images available on Azure Marketplace for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) deployments, according to Nerdio.

The vendor hasn’t been shy about the business opportunities for itself and Microsoft partners migrating users of legacy virtualization vendors such as Citrix and VMware to Microsoft offerings plus leveraging Nerdio to adopt Microsoft Intune as a remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool.

In CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs, Nerdio said that it expects the number of channel partners it works with to increase within the next 12 months.