Green Cloud To Acquire MSSP To Add Security To Its MSP Services
“We will be completely focused on bringing Cascade Defense’s security to our partners. We are not taking dollars off the table of our MSPs. Everything we roll out is to help our base of MSPs and service providers offer managed security to their customers,” says Charles Houser, co-founder and executive vice president of sales and marketing for Green Cloud Technologies.
Green Cloud Technologies, which provides cloud IaaS technologies exclusively to managed service providers and other solution providers, this week unveiled the planned acquisition of a security MSP and promised that the acquisition, rather than cause channel conflict, will actually benefit its MSP partners.
Green Cloud has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Cascade Defense, a Spokane, Wash.-based managed security service provider, for an undisclosed sum.
The purpose of the acquisition, expected to close within the next week or so, is to bring a set of MSP-focused security services to MSPs who might otherwise not be able to offer them to their clients, said Charles Houser, co-founder and executive vice president of sales and marketing for Greenville, S.C.-based Green Cloud.
The typical MSP working with Green Cloud has between eight and 25 employees serving perhaps 30 to 50 managed services clients, and can’t be expected to be experts in all the different technologies they provide those clients, Houser told CRN.
“To be an expert in security, including SIM-as-a-service and SOC-as-a-service, takes a lot of talent and capital,” he said, referring to security information management and security operations center. “When MSPs come to us, we provide the solutions they can sell to their customers as managed security offerings. Building that for 30 to 50 customers doesn’t make financial sense.”
Security is the biggest headache for MSPs, Houser said.
“Some customers want to pay for the service, some don’t,” he said. “But to roll out security as part their services, MSPs need to send their techs to school. Just like with the cloud, where you don’t build your own data center if only offering a subset of what customers need, you don’t want to build a security practice if only a subset of your customers will pay for it.”
Cascade Defense is a profitable provider of security services only to end-user clients, Houser said. The company manages about 450 endpoints in Washington state, with a few in Oregon, he said.
Despite Cascade Defense’s own customer base, the company’s technology will become the managed security offering of Green Cloud, Houser said.
“We will be completely focused on bringing Cascade Defense’s security to our partners,” he said. “We are not taking dollars off the table of our MSPs. Everything we roll out is to help our base of MSPs and service providers offer managed security to their customers.”
Green Cloud, which is profitable and has no private equity funding, works with about 685 MSPs and other solution providers, Houser said.
“We essentially act as an MSP’s cloud department,” he said. “Production servers, infrastructure, data protection, and now security, that’s what we provide.”