SKOUT Adds Former RSA CEO Coviello As Senior Advisor

‘In retirement, I’ve focused on tough intellectual problems, and I don’t think there is a tougher one than bringing security to the masses of small businesses, and to do it through MSPs is a fascinating approach,’ says SKOUT Cybersecurity, senior advisor Art Coviello Jr.

SKOUT Cybersecurity announced this week that it nabbed one of the top minds in network protection, the former CEO of RSA Security, Art Coviello Jr., to act as an advisor to the company as it looks to harness momentum it has found this year.

“In retirement, I’ve focused on tough intellectual problems, and I don’t think there is a tougher one than bringing security to the masses of small businesses, and to do it through MSPs is a fascinating approach,” he told CRN. “There isn’t a single business down to the smallest medical practice or law firm that hasn’t been transformed by the digital revolution that has been going on for 20 years now. With that great promise comes tremendous risk.”

Coviello said while small businesses have a critical need for cybersecurity, they are not equipped to financially or technically to address it.

“I think SKOUT has come up with a very unique solution to address that problem,” he said. “Nowadays I live vicariously through these young management teams and hopefully help them avoid the mistakes that I made along the way as they build their business.”

The Melville, N.Y.-based software vendor said it has grown customers by 700 percent this year amid a national surge in cyberattacks that has targeted large system’s integrators with billion dollar budgets as fiercely as small rural school districts. With the U.S. government threatening to crack down on some ransomware victims who do pay, small businesses’ need for help with this epidemic has never been greater.

“We truly believe that MSPs are going to be the real vehicle for securing small businesses over time,” said SKOUT Cybersecurity CEO and Co-Founder Aidan Kehoe. “The value propositions that we‘ve been consistently delivering from day one is, ‘How do you give MSPs one platform, one dashboard, one place to call, when they have a problem?’ ”

SKOUT offers MSPs several SaaS security solutions, a email monitoring, end point protection, network monitoring, log security monitoring, and Office 365 monitoring. Amid the remote work boom in March and April, the company designed work from home packages for its MSPs to resell into their customers environments, wherever those may be.

“The first thing is the threat surface completely changed,” Kehoe said. “So instead of it being nice and easy to wrap up inside somebody‘s network, everybody who had access became a different risk vector. We focused our offerings on solving the first two problems we saw: business email compromise, and secondly, you want to make sure you secure the endpoint. So, we combine those two things up, back by our 24x7 Security Operations Center. Because if an MSP has a problem there’s no 911. There’s no emergency services. They need that support.”

Coviello said in today’s threat environment, MSPs need security allies like never before, and he sees SKOUT as one place they can lean.

“These guys are vastly underserved by the much bigger MSSPs. The whole MSSP space is one where it‘s extremely fragmented and there aren’t enough good solutions,” he said. “So having a company that’s focused on MSPs, and delivering a solution for their end customer’s has got to be such an absolute relief, that they do become the one, at three o’clock in the morning, that you can call and know somebody is going to be there to help.”

As the executive vice president, president, CEO and former executive chairman of RSA Security, Coviello helped drive the company’s growth and revenues to more than $1 billion before retiring in 2015. Under Coviello, the RSA Conference became the most respected, vendor-agnostic event in cybersecurity.

In addition to his role at SKOUT, Coviello is a venture partner at Rally Ventures, an advisor to ClearSky Security Fund and senior advisor to Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Group. He is a member of the board of directors of Synchrony Financial, Tenable, and several security startups.

Coviello plans to keynote SKOUT’s business-building, virtual event on October 28 REBOUND 2020. The event will show SKOUT’s MSP partners and prospects ways to grow a business more profitably, maintain security and build resiliency for the long term.