WhiteDog Cybersecurity Aims To Recruit MSPs To Deliver Its ‘Real XDR’ Platform

Shahin Pirooz, a channel veteran and founder of WhiteDog, says he’s seen the massive need to bring a more-comprehensive detection and response offering to MSPs.

WhiteDog Cybersecurity is seeking to drive the expansion of its MDR (managed detection and response) alternative platform through recruiting an array of new MSP partners, the company’s founder told CRN.

Shahin Pirooz, a channel veteran who founded WhiteDog Cybersecurity within DataEndure, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based MSP, brought WhiteDog out of stealth in June 2023. Since then, the startup has been working to make its detection and response offering even more useful for MSPs while bringing aboard managed service partners to deliver the platform to customers, Pirooz said.

WhiteDog’s platform aims to be more comprehensive than most MDR providers—covering a wider array of environments beyond just managed detection for endpoints—while also being highly flexible by enabling MSPs to “pick what fits best in their ecosystem,” he said.

“So if they have gaps, they can pick individual [components],” Pirooz said. “Or they can pick SSE [security service edge] and XDR [extended detection and response] and they’ve got a full platform. It could be an all-in-one solution, or it could be individually selected.”

WhiteDog has taken a unique approach by taking capabilities from multiple vendors and integrating those technologies into a single, unified architecture, which the company calls its “composable” architecture, Pirooz said.

“Every year, we do evaluations in every [product] category — and if a tool is no longer the best, at our cost, we change it in the backend,” he said. “But nothing changes for the customer and the MSP.”

Unlike many other MDR platforms, WhiteDog seeks to offer “real XDR,” Pirooz said — amounting to “detection and response in every layer of email, DNS, identity, network and endpoint.”

The wide array of capabilities offered by WhiteDog is certainly a differentiator, said Jeremy Kushner, co-founder and CEO of BACS Consulting Group. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based MSP is one early MSP that’s seen major advantages in working with WhiteDog, Kushner said, calling the vendor’s platform a “complete” offering.

Many other detection and response platforms tend to offer “bits and pieces,” he said. “WhiteDog was the first solution we saw that had absolutely everything we needed — all integrated together, all handled on the backend by one team.”

This comprehensive approach relieves BACS of the need to work with multiple vendors and figure out how to integrate their technologies together — something that would serve as a major distraction from the MSP’s main specialization on management of IT systems, according to Kushner.

“It satisfied our need for a robust security offering,” he said. “What that did is it freed up incredible bandwidth for us to be able to focus on our core competency, which is managed services. So it has allowed us to grow our business by being able to focus almost entirely on the managed services piece and allow WhiteDog to do the security for us.”

Ultimately, “no one else out there is doing what they're doing at this point in time, at this price point, for MSPs,” Kushner said.

The aim now for WhiteDog is to grow the ranks of MSP partners working with the company and its platform, according to Pirooz.

Most of the MSPs that are finding WhiteDog to be a strong fit are those that are focusing on SMBs and have between 30 and 50 customers, he said.

WhiteDog is now looking to expand its base of SMB-focused MSPs to between 100 and 200 service provider partners, Pirooz said.

“Once that groundswell starts to happen, we're going to start seeing the mid-size enterprise MSPs coming into play,” he said. “Right now, a lot of those players are building their own stacks. But it's really expensive and it takes a lot of people to maintain and continuously evolve the stack.”

But even for MSPs of that size, the promise will always be to “never worry about or buy or purchase or configure or tweak a tool again,” Pirooz said.

“We handle all the integration. We handle all the correlation. We handle the threat hunting,” he said. “So they can sit in front of their customers and show the stats they're doing for security — 'Here's what we're getting.' And they don't have to ever log into any of these consoles other than our portal.”