IT Nation Connect 2023 Recap: ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management

Posted:

12/13/2023

| By:

Raffael Marty

After the largest and best-attended IT Nation Connect™ ever, I want to share more about what the latest ConnectWise Cybersecurity Management innovations mean to managed service providers (MSPs) and the security of their small and midsized business (SMB) clients.  

ConnectWise MDR

First, let’s talk about ConnectWise MDR™, or managed detection and response. Businesses of all sizes are increasingly vulnerable to the growing number, type, and frequency of cyberthreats. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is perhaps the most important starting point in any cybersecurity journey to help keep malicious actors at bay.

However, endpoint protection is only as good as your ability to monitor detections and escalations and respond to them. Building your own 24/7/365 security operations center (SOC) to monitor all of your endpoints is a costly and resource-intensive project. We specifically built ConnectWise MDR to help MSPs overcome this challenge.  

When talking to our partners, we’ve learned that our unique approach to delivering MDR services with remediation and a human focus, rather than simply forwarding alerts, is key to their success. ConnectWise also knows that choice is vital to your clients.

In October, we announced two additions to our MDR service to enable your ability to offer a solution that fits your specific cyber needs. In addition to our existing MDR service with SentinelOne or Bitdefender, we now support the option to “bring your own license” for SentinelOne, and we’ve also launched ConnectWise MDR™ for Microsoft Defender for Business. ConnectWise is excited to collaborate with Microsoft to bring you the best possible MDR service that’s purpose-built for MSPs. 

ConnectWise PSA

Many of our cybersecurity partners use ConnectWise PSA™ to manage tickets, and we’ve improved how they interact with the ConnectWise SOC. Our new integration between ConnectWise PSA ticketing and our SOC supports bi-directional ticket synchronization, enabling partners to simplify MDR management using fewer consoles.   

ConnectWise SIEM

We’ve also improved ConnectWise SIEM™. Enhanced alerting and correlation extend the detection engine’s ability to detect more sophisticated attacks and reduce false positives by analyzing sequences of activities.

In addition, a new collection of use case-driven alerts, dashboards, and reports help you get a deeper understanding of the cybersecurity posture and situational awareness across your customers’ entire Microsoft estate. And finally, for our international partners, especially those in the EU, we can host log files in-region to help simplify GDPR compliance and sales conversations.  

ConnectWise Vulnerability Management

ConnectWise Vulnerability Management™ can now operate independently of ConnectWise RMM™. You can deploy the scanner on any device to gain insights into its vulnerabilities and then manage them via the ConnectWise Asio™ platform without a ConnectWise RMM agent. To further extend the capabilities of ConnectWise Vulnerability Management, it now includes network discovery and scanning, which reveals network devices previously not visible and scans them.

In the past, locating Internet of Things (IoT), hidden, or hard-to-find devices and inventorying their vulnerabilities wasn’t possible. Now, you can have all of them scanned with or without an agent—and you can use Asio to patch discovered vulnerabilities automatically. No device is left behind! 

And there’s more “hyperautomation” news for ConnectWise cybersecurity. ConnectWise SaaS Security™ Essentials, now integrated with the Asio workflow engine, enables alerts to create tickets in Asio ticketing and launch automatic remediation scripts to help stop hackers in their tracks.

Vulnerability Management will also be part of the Asio workflow engine, so you can create powerful workflows that combine ConnectWise Vulnerability Management and RMM triggers with ConnectWise SaaS Security Essentials actions.  

You may be wondering about potential ConnectWise RMM and ConnectWise PSA integrations with our strategic EDR providers. Partners that use SentinelOne Control or SentinelOne Complete can now easily create tickets for alerts and simplify billing through ConnectWise PSA. In addition, a new integration with ConnectWise RMM makes SentinelOne endpoint deployment, monitoring, and management easier for MSPs.   