Channel Brief: PagerDuty Survey Shows High Cost of Incidents, Cofense Boosts Email Security

Morning, folks!

A new study from PagerDuty quantifies something many of us already know intuitively: Customer-facing incidents are lengthy, costly and they damage customers' trust in your organization. However, automation is a key technology that can help.

In vendor news, Cofense has enhanced its PhishMe employee security awareness training platform with new employee engagement metrics to help address the 'human element' of security and NaaS provider Nitel is integrating Fortinet technology into its Secure SD-WAN solution.

Startup Odaseva is laser-focused on securing Salesforce environments, and has raised $54 million in Series C funding to further that goal, and Arrow Electronics has signed a new distribution deal with digital infrastructure firm Equinix in EMEA.

As always, drop me a line at [email protected] if you have news to share or want to say hi!

Grab your coffee. Here's what you need to know today.

Today’s Tech, Channel and MSP News

1. Cofense Enhances Email Security Awareness Training: Cofense this week announced new enhancements to its PhishMe Employee Security Awareness Training (SAT) platform. The latest addition, the Employee Engagement Index (EEI), continuously monitors employee interactions with PhishMe simulations and provides real-time data about users' readiness to combat phishing threats. PhishMe’s EEI leverages Cofense curated threat intelligence combined with current employee behavioral patterns. The EEI then generates a continuously updated proficiency score, displaying a personalized metric that assesses individuals, cohorts, groups and departments so organizations can identify areas needing improvement and target remediation efforts. 

2. Nitel Expands NaaS Portfolio Through Fortinet Partnership: Network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider Nitel is expanding its network management and security solutions by adding Secure SD-WAN with Fortinet technology. The addition of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN makes Nitel's NaaS solutions suitable for small-to-medium enterprises, the company said in a statement. The partnership builds upon Nitel’s global SASE services announced last summer and builds on the technical, management and support capabilities Nitel gained through its acquisition of WAN Dynamics in March.

3. PagerDuty Survey Shows High Cost of Customer-Facing Incidents: A PagerDuty study of 500 IT leaders and decision-makers highlights the growing impacts of customer-facing incidents and the ways automation can help mitigate them. The study polled companies with more than 1,000 employees responsible for IT operations from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The results showed that the average incident takes nearly three hours to resolve (175 minutes) while the estimated cost of downtime is $4,537 per minute, meaning each incident can cost nearly $794,000. As respondents’ organizations saw an average of 25 high-priority/priority incidents in the last 12 months, the cumulative costs add up to just under $20 million per year, per organization. However, respondents also recognized the role end-to-end IT automation can play in identifying, mitigating and resolving these incidents. You can read more here.

4. Odaseva Raises $54 Million to Secure Salesforce: Decades after the advent of cloud computing, securing cloud environments remains a massive challenge, especially with cloud-based applications like Salesforce. As TechCrunch reported, startup Odaseva has raised $54 million in Series C funding by focusing on this one sole use case: Securing Salesforce environments. Silver Lake Waterman is leading this round, with previous backers F-Prime, Eight Roads and Serena Capital also participating. New backers Eurazeo and Crescent Cove are completing the round, TechCrunch said. To date, Odaseva has raised $90 million. Former Salesforce employee, Odaseva founder and CEO Sovan Bin said that his company's sub-$100 million pre-money estimate in PitchBook is incorrect, and considering the startup passed 100 million users in November 2022 and counts Accor, Schneider Electric and Michelin as customers, he's probably right -- though he did not disclose an actual valuation.

5. Arrow Signs Distro Deal With Equinix in EMEA: Arrow Electronics has signed a new distribution agreement with digital infrastructure company Equinix. Through the deal, Arrow channel partners can resell Equinix services as part of integrated network optimization, hybrid multi-cloud and application workload performance management solutions and gain a monthly recurring revenue stream, the companies said. The Equinix Platform includes data center co-location, private connections to major public cloud providers and interconnections within more than 260 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers globally.

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