01732 759725 42 Q&A With Tim Weller, CEO of Datto Respond stages of the NIST organisational security framework that Datto already addresses with its complementary Datto RMM Ransomware Detection and SaaS Defense application security products. To find out more about the thinking behind the acquisition and its benefits for Datto MSP customers and their clients, Technology Reseller caught up with Datto CEO Tim Weller. Technology Reseller (TR): How does the Infocyte acquisition fit into your security ecosystem and product strategy? Tim Weller (TW): At our investor day in December, we talked about Datto’s RMM platform and Datto’s SaaS platform as being our two key platforms for security. Last year, we acquired BitDam and integrated them into our SaaS Protection platform, giving us security for all of Microsoft 365 – email, Teams, SharePoint – and some Google Workspace as well. Now, we’re acquiring a small company called Infocyte that we’ll integrate into our RMM platform. RMM works on the endpoints, SaaS works at the end user level – they’re two pieces in a security stack. About a year ago, we launched a ransomware detection tool for RMM, so we’re already in the security business with an add-on for that, which itself is a critical part of an MSP’s base security platform. This [acquisition] is an obvious development for anyone who’s been watching Datto. We’ve telegraphed our move into this protection, detection, response space for six to nine months with a lot of internal development work. That’s our primary motion – we love to build tech from scratch – but we also have an active M&A team. When we met Infocyte last summer it wasn’t clear whether they were for sale or not. We just got to know and like each other and decided we’d combine. TR: So, you’re going to integrate Infocyte’s technologies into your RMM, much as you did with BitDam and SaaS Protection? TW: That’s right. We essentially extended their technology. At the time, BitDam was a very small company going down the route of selling to enterprises. We pulled their technology off the market and repurposed it for managed service providers. After a further six months of development, we integrated it into our SaaS Protection platform. It’ll be similar with Infocyte. Infocyte does have a business that serves MSSPs as well, doing incident response and some other things. We will keep that operating on the side, as they are valuable partners to us in their own right and because MSSPs often serve MSPs in this complicated world where several different layers of partners work for each other. But we’ll take the bulk of their technology components and integrate them into Datto RMM and make that even stronger than it already is. TR: Will this technology provide an added layer of security for MSPs, as well as for their customers’ endpoints? TW: It will to the extent that MSPs manage their own endpoints and to the extent that in some of the attacks we’ve seen over the last few years the attacker has tried to escalate from the MSP’s RMM and get inside the MSP. We have done an enormous amount of work over the last five years working on security for our RMM. It’s really built-in from the beginning, because on the one hand an RMM is an incredibly valuable tool for MSPs to manage security – I occasionally hear an MSP say ‘we’re getting rid of our RMM to be safer’, but doing that does not make you safer. On the other hand, it is a very exposed tool if you have security threats that can weaponise it. We now have almost 60 people on the security team who are just focused on keeping the RMM safe, and this acquisition – Infocyte has 27 employees – will extend that. But the primary focus is to get add-on solutions for MSPs to protect their clients. Last month, Datto, a provider of cloudbased software and security solutions purpose-built for delivery by MSPs, strengthened its cyber security offering with the acquisition of Infocyte, a specialist in Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) technologies and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. Datto’s second security-focused acquisition in less than 12 months, following that of Israeli cyber threat detection company BitDam last March, highlights the growing importance of frontline cyber security solutions to its proposition. BitDam advanced threat protection and spam-filtering technology, which protects cloud-based collaboration tools such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace from ransomware, malware and phishing, including zero-day threats, has already been integrated into Datto’s security stack in the form of SaaS Defense. Announced at DattoCon in October, this provides MSPs with patented technology to proactively detect and prevent malicious malware, phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks on Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. The complete integration of SaaS Defense with Datto SaaS backup and recovery in the company’s new SaaS Protection+ solution enables MSPs to provide their clients with multi-layered protection against cloud data loss caused by user error, ransomware and other security incidents. Now, with the acquisition of Infocyte, Datto plans to reinforce its endpoint line of defence by integrating the Austin, Texas-based company’s capabilities into the Datto RMM platform. These include patented technologies that continuously collect and correlate data from endpoints to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, supported by a team of security analysts in a Security Operations Centre (SOC) who can respond in real-time to escalated cyberthreats. These capabilities represent a significant strengthening of Datto’s capabilities within the Protect, Detect and Q&A
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