CRN Exclusive: Security Startup BluVector Unveils Turnkey Detection and Response Tool For MSPs

BluVector said its new BluVector-as-a-Service offering would dramatically reduce costs and time-to-market for managed detection and response, according to CEO Kris Lovejoy.

MSPs have long struggled to bring high-margin, new technologies to market because of the operational costs associated with buying and re-architecting hardware, she said.

"We are getting a lot of interest for MSSPs and MSPs," Lovejoy said. "Until today, it was hard to fulfill them because of the investment they had to make. This is a way for up to jumpstart them."

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BluVector-as-a-Service makes it possible for solution providers to deliver core managed security functions such as health monitoring, configuration, maintenance, patching, upgrading, and triaging high-priority alerts without having to allocate their own resources, according to Lovejoy.

The channel can instead devote their time and energy to quarterly threat assessments, threat hunting, forensic retainers, and deep security analytics, Lovejoy said. BluVector sells exclusively through the channel outside of the public sector, where certain clients mandate a direct relationship, according to Lovejoy.

Partners using BluVector-as-a-Service can expect to enjoy margins of between 50 percent and 60 percent after accounting for upfront hardware and software costs, according to Lovejoy. Pricing for MSPs is based on the amount of traffic being processed, Lovejoy said, and is the same regardless of the number of virtual machines under management.

Before the launch of BluVector-as-a-Service, Lovejoy said it usually took between a month a year for MSPs to get up and running on the company's technology following the contract signing. Now, Lovejoy said they could activate BluVector's offering pretty much instantaneously after signing on the dotted line.

BluVector today has five managed services partners and would like to sign an additional 10 to 20 MSPs or MSSPs by the end of next year, according to Lovejoy. At least 10 to 15 of those managed services partners should see BluVector as central to their business and sell it as part of their core portfolio, Lovejoy said.

The company's typical end customer has less than 100 employees and a small, in-house IT staff that needs to secure its intellectual property and cloud-based email system without breaking the bank, Lovejoy said. IT is roughly 10 percent of an SMBs overall budget, and security is just a fraction of that, Lovejoy said, meaning the economics must work so that businesses can afford protection at that price.

"They do not want to spend a lot of money, but they need best-in-class protection," Lovejoy said.

BluVector was founded in 2015 and recognized as one of CRN's 2017 Emerging Vendors. The company said its use of supervised machine learning allows its security teams to detect and contain advanced security threats 80 percent more quickly than traditional approaches.

SISAP, a solution provider in Guatemala City, had been relying on traditional IT security for its customers, but now plans to roll BluVector-as-a-Service out to customers that are most at risk and most worried about attacks, according to Mauricio Nanne, president and CEO of SISAP.

"We think it brings this really leading-edge technology to the possibility of us serving our customers with very effective detection and response without having to build it on our own," Nanne said.