Dragos Overhauls Channel Program To Boost Partner Enablement Around OT Security

The industrial cybersecurity vendor said it’s making skills training and other resources available to partners through its self-service portal, as it looks to engage with more resellers and service providers.

Dragos Channel Chief Jon Pringle

Dragos announced a new channel program Tuesday that seeks to scale up the industrial cybersecurity vendor’s work with partners, ultimately helping resellers and service providers to better meet the growing demand for operational technology (OT) security.

The company has overhauled numerous elements of the channel program with a particular focus on making skills training and other resources available through its self-service portal, as a way to help more partners gain expertise and proficiency with the Dragos platform, said Jon Pringle, vice president of U.S. channel at Dragos.

[Related: Cybersecurity Channel Moves: Q2 2023]

While many customers at this point are becoming more well-versed in IT security, “they’re really looking for partners out there that may help them” on the OT side, Pringle told CRN.

The growing interest in OT security from customers — and the partners who serve them — has prompted Dragos leadership including Co-Founder and CEO Robert Lee and CRO Christophe Culine to prioritize a revamp of its channel program and partner portal, in order to make the company’s work with partners more scalable, he said.

With the updated portal, for instance, partners will be able to access hands-on training and product documentation that in the past has often been delivered to partners directly by Dragos personnel, Pringle said.

“It was a lift for us to do that,” he said. “If they need to call us, they can call us — but really the first pass is going to be using [the portal for] self-service, to get them to a level where they’re extremely comfortable.”

One goal for Hanover, Md.-based Dragos is to rely more heavily on its partner community for delivering services around the vendor’s OT security platform, such as assessment services, tabletop exercises and incident response services, according to Pringle.

“Although we’ll always have the ability to do services, we really want our partners to [be doing] 98 to 99 percent of that,” he said.

In addition to training and documentation resources, the new Dragos partner program includes deal registration, marketing assets such as co-branding materials and sales and marketing support.

Financial benefits include volume discounts, increased margin for partners that identify customer opportunities and market development funds (MDF), which includes proposal-based MDF opportunities.

Partner Perspective

The new Dragos channel program is a major step in the right direction, said Ryan Morris, president of Blackwood, an Annapolis, Md.-based solution and service provider that has partnered with Dragos for several years.

“This is the program that’s needed to actually get the partner community enabled at scale,” Morris told CRN. With the updates, the program “enables us to truly be an extension of Dragos,” he said.

The new Dragos program comes at a pivotal moment, as many organizations have begun placing a bigger emphasis on OT security just in the past 12 to 18 months, Morris said.

All in all, Dragos is “taking all their expertise and making it available to a much wider set of partners” with the new program, he said.

Dragos currently works with more than 75 partners, and expects to increase that number with the help of the new program, Pringle said.

The Dragos platform offers key capabilities for industrial control systems (ICS) cybersecurity including asset visibility, vulnerability management, threat detection, investigation and response. ICS/OT systems are utilized by many organizations in critical infrastructure sectors such as energy, water and manufacturing.

The privately held company last announced funding in October 2021, when it raised a $200 million Series D round at a $1.7 billion valuation.