Cyber protection firm Liongard shared news of a key partnership this month that is set to help services providers not only better manage cyber risk but also provide a potential revenue stream.
In a strategic move, Liongard announced that along with Cork, it will begin offering a bundled solution on Nov. 15 that includes Liongard’s platform and $100,000 worth of cyber warranty.
Michelle Accardi
CEO
Liongard
In an interview with ChannelPro, Liongard CEO Michelle Accardi shed some light on the move, emphasizing its potential impact on MSP profitability and enhanced cybersecurity posture. The partnership aims to provide MSPs with swift financial coverage and settlements after security incidents.
The way it works is should an MSP’s customer have a breach, Cork will issue the MSP a virtual credit card to start paying for the remediation, as opposed to waiting for insurance to provide reimbursement after the fact, Accardi explained.
“Cork gets you started. That doesn’t mean that cyber insurance isn’t important, but there are customers who either can’t afford that, or want to leverage Cork and Liongard protection.”
Cyber criminals are constantly evolving, so it’s important for IT services providers to be vigilant in protecting sensitive information for their SMB customers, Cork CEO Carlson Choi said in a prepared statement.
“In partnership with Liongard, we are expanding access to the Cork platform to a greater number of SMBs, further demonstrating our ongoing investment and dedication to empowering MSPs to become the cybersecurity and cyber-attack prevention arm for their customers.”
New Value-Add Services
Along with the Cork partnership, Liongard’s newly launched Cyber Risk Dashboard offers comprehensive cybersecurity controls, giving IT services providers the ability to surface that information to customers in an easy-to-understand control panel. With this, they can show customers where their cyber posture is, whether its MFA, email, websites, endpoints, Windows, Linux, or Mac, Accardi said. It also offers an opportunity for MSPs to monetize the solution, she added.
“The underlying core is a cyber warranty platform, and they use Liongard as the technology to help underwrite the risk. MSPs can’t sell cyber insurance, but cyber warranty, MSPs can sell, and they can mark it up. Thinking about that profitability and now they get all the benefit of Liongard as well. You get to use it for all the other great use cases that Liongard has, like billing reconciliation, IT asset management, discovery – so, there’s lots of value.”
Jason Robbins, vice president of services at Business Data Solutions, provided a customer perspective on Liongard’s impact, as his company uses roughly 12 or 14 of the inspectors. It is slowly rolling the service out to all of its clients as just part of the standard offering, Robbins said.
“We recently onboarded with Gradient. When you’re on board with Gradient, you get so many integrations as part of the standard offering, and then it costs you more per month if you go past that. It saved us money because the integration with Liongard is one in.”
In fact, Liongard built upon its work with Gradient and Cork MSP, revealing additional strategic partnerships with MSPbots, Pia and Rewst. This marks another step forward in Liongard’s dedication to empowering MSPs with data-driven automation and response capabilities to continuously maintain their cybersecurity posture.
By combining Liongard’s CCDR platform with proactive intelligence, AI-led automation, and robotic process automation, MSPs gain enhanced capabilities, Accardi said. “These strategic partnerships underscore our commitment to providing MSPs and IT organizations with the data and extensibility they need to deliver continuous cybersecurity posture management and thrive in today’s dynamic IT landscape.”
