You closed your biggest ever acquisition in February in the shape of SecureWorks. Where are you in the integration?
We’re moving at pace on the integration, and have just achieved a milestone on the technology integration itself which brings the Sophos endpoint in as the primary sensor and primary agent in the Taegis environment.
We continue to support all the third parties we’ve worked with, so if the customers are running anyone else on their endpoint, we’ll continue to support them within the MDR service. Then we’re still continuing to grow the number of integrations we’ve got on the platform – over 350 integrations now. So that part of it is moving along very nicely.
We’re going to launch our ITDR offering next month – that’s Identity Threat Detection and Response. This is a great capability that the SecureWorks team had built based on the learnings from their engagements with their advisory services.
The phrase so many of us have heard now – ‘identity is the new perimeter’ – is absolutely true, and in many cases it becomes the first line of defence or first line of breach for organisations, so identity hygiene is absolutely critical.
Stolen credentials is still one of the primary ways attackers are getting into environments today, so the better an organisation can understand what their identity infrastructure and footprint looks like, the better they can understand the hygiene of their identity systems, whether they’re using pervasive multi-factor authentication for example, the better their odds at preventing an attack from occurring, or surviving one if it does succeed..
To what extent does this move mirror Palo Alto Networks’ planned acquisition of identity player CyberArk?
Identity is a very complicated market, and one of the fundamental elements of identity is the identity provider itself. If you think about who the primary identity providers are today, it’s Microsoft and Google. Then there are a number of identity companies that attempt to compete with them.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to compete with Microsoft and Google. I think it’s a good idea to partner with Microsoft and Google, which is our strategy.
I would go further, and say that any company which engages in a zero-sum game with them is probably burning inordinate amounts of capital. A much better deployment of their resources would be a partnering strategy.
I’m not going to go compete with Microsoft; I’m going to go and make Microsoft better. One of the ways we can do that is with offerings like our Identity Threat Detection and Response. Many of our customers are Microsoft subscribers, whether it’s Business Premium or an A5 or an E5 license. So many of them are using Entra ID. I want to make Entra ID better for them; I want to make Defender better for them. And that’s our strategy.
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