When Dan Candee (pictured above, right, with Cole Knuth) joined AWS several years ago, then-CEO Andy Jassy made one thing clear: Security is job zero. That mindset stuck with Candee. Fast forward to now, when the CEO of Cork Protection Inc. had a three-hour coffee meeting with UKON CEO Cole Knuth, it helped shape a new vision for MSPs. Both leaders saw a gap between cybersecurity tools and the financial protection SMBs need to survive modern threats.
Together, the two men formulated a partnership that melds Cork’s real-time risk insights and UKON’s insurance marketplace. Their goal was to help MSPs shift from technical operators to true cyber risk advisors.
Candee, appointed CEO of Cork last year, brings deep enterprise experience — including with AWS and Dell — to a company focused on empowering MSPs. Knuth, meanwhile, recently led the rebrand of FifthWall Solutions to UKON, signaling a sharper focus on connecting insurance capacity with the channel.
ChannelPro sat down to chat with Candee and Knuth to learn how their alliance started, what MSPs can take advantage of today, and what they can look forward to. Below is an edited version of the conversation.
ChannelPro: How Did the Partnership Idea First Come Together?
Candee: Like many things in the MSP community, it starts with a cup of coffee and trying to understand how we can be of service to one another. It was, “What’s the vision for your company? What’s the vision for my company?” We were trying to figure out what financial protection actually means for SMBs, and what does it mean to empower managed service providers. Turns out we both wanted to do that.
Knuth: I ran strategy at Pax8 for the two years before I left to do this. The most important thing when you look at partnerships, mergers, acquisitions, or anything of the type is to stretch people’s minds and look at that five-year vision. For Dan and I to start our relationship understanding where he wanted the company to go and where I wanted the company to go, that created a really nice synergy. It was a really beautiful conversation between the two of us.
ChannelPro: You Both Talked About a Shared Mission to Protect Main Street. What Does That Mean for MSPs?
Knuth: We want to be the primary outlet and continue to build on our reputation as being the largest cyber insurance provider in the channel. But we don’t want to be a cybersecurity company. So it’s a really good complement to what Dan and the Cork mission was already building.
Rebranding to UKON marked a strategic evolution from wholesale broker to cyber insurance marketplace.
Candee: The thing that is most interesting to me is the financial protection piece. I’d been watching billion-dollar companies with huge cybersecurity budgets survive attacks, while Main Street was struggling. When Cole said his mission is that every business has the right to survive a cyberattack, that really resonated.
ChannelPro: What Can MSPs Do Today Through the Cork and UKON Partnership?
Knuth: Our core product to MSPs is a risk reduction platform — taking security data, both outside and inside data, and putting liability around that so MSPs can start having the conversation about liability. Then, we allow the customer, when they’re ready, to access an insurance market. That whole first part of the journey, we’re just presenting data.
The partnership with Cork gives us reach, accessibility, and insights. We’re taking 10% of what Cork offers and presenting that — just a snapshot with a few pieces of data — to help move the customer through the lifecycle.
Candee: I feel like both Cork and UKON are working backwards from a mandate that organizations have the right to survive and thrive when threat actors hit them. That means they need managed service providers to guide them now more than ever. Historically, that meant reacting to tech needs. Now, it’s a mandate for MSPs to be proactive thought leaders and business partners.
ChannelPro: What Makes This Partnership Different From Other Vendor/insurance Alignments?
Candee: When Cole came to me and said, ‘I want to simplify it.’ I said, ‘That’s a lot to unwind but it’s a worthwhile cause.’ And that in and of itself equals disruption. … You’ve got technology, insurance, and warranty converging, which in the past never happened. All these things are completely separate.
Knuth: You keep seeing everyone trying to participate in this connection to ecosystems, but they keep doing it one on one. … That’s not progress; that’s just marketing. That’s a discount on your insurance policy for buying one product. That’s not saving anybody. Dan and I both aligned very early on this idea that there’s an easier way to connect these supply chains. We’re both wide in the cybersecurity ecosystem. Cork is really deep in it. And in insurance, we go deep. It’s a really great relationship.
Cork introduced its Cyber Insurance Analyzer tool for MSPs.
ChannelPro: What’s Phase 2 of the Cork and UKON Partnership?
Candee: There are a lot of people who need help with what we are doing today. Expanding our reach and providing more service is simply our mission. That allows the flywheel between UKON and Cork to truly accelerate.
Cork is ingesting millions of these compliance events quarter over quarter. We feed that information back to our partner to help them keep providing more effective, less expensive, more insightful insurance and risk products. We’ve also released something called the Cyber Insurance Policy Analyzer. Our partners have clients coming to them going, “How does our cyber insurance policy look?” or “What do you think about our risk profile?” I’ve created the ability to put them in contact with UKON because I don’t sell insurance. I’ve just created a simple way to connect the dots.
Knuth: There’s a lot we could do together. We’ve talked about new warranty products. We want to add value around simplicity and speed, like how things are actioned and how data is provided. We want to be an enabler in this marketplace.
ChannelPro: Any closing thoughts for MSPs looking at this alliance?
Knuth: UKON is an incredible way for people to get an early taste and start using Cork as an opportunity to go a lot deeper. That’s one of the reasons the partnership’s so mutually beneficial.
Candee: We’ve seen how threat actors are getting around good cybersecurity tools through supply chain attacks, stealing ACH transfers, running business email schemes. It takes MSPs, insurance providers, warranty products, the police, even the pizza delivery guy feeding teams during incident response. That’s what I love about UKON and Cork. We’re creating yet another ecosystem to support MSPs when it really matters.
Images: Anjali Fluker/The ChannelPro Network
