Here’s how Kaspersky works with partners in Asia

Ernest Chai, Head of Channel for APAC at Kaspersky discusses the opportunities in the region as well as how the cybersecurity vendor is working with different types of partners to cater to customers in the region.

In February this year, Kaspersky introduced significant enhancements to its partner program for Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) partners. These updates reinforce Kaspersky’s commitment to a partner-first approach, ensuring its ecosystem aligns seamlessly with the evolving business models and needs of its partners.

In Asia, the managed services segment of the cybersecurity vendor continues to witness an increasing demand as customers remain challenged by the lack of skills in cybersecurity as well as having sufficient talent to manage the various cybersecurity solutions they have.

For Kaspersky, its partner ecosystem in the region plays a vital role in delivering these products and services to customers in Asia. To understand more about how Kaspersky is working with its partners in the region, CRN Asia speaks to Ernest Chai, Head of Channel for APAC at Kaspersky.

Chai shares the opportunities in the region as well as how the cybersecurity vendor is working with different types of partners to cater to customer requests in the region.

Can you tell us a bit more how Kaspersky works with its partners in the Asian region?

Kaspersky's always been globally renowned for our cybersecurity solution. In Asia, we have various different types of partnerships and different partners that engage with us. They range from distributors through to resellers, and we also engage with system integrators as well as specialized cybersecurity partners.

Another partner profile would be around managed services. So managed service providers and managed security service providers, MSSPs, is becoming a growing segment.

We also have technology alliance partners and OEMs, who have their own solutions and embed our solutions as a part of theirs to provide that as an offering to their customers. That's more for the B2B business.

On the B2C business, we have retail chains that engage with us. We have consumer business alliances we see successes around telcos in that segment, who are offering B2C solutions to their customers. So that's the profile of partners that we kind of see in the APAC region.

With that many partners, how important is it to understand what they need when it comes to dealing with customers?

When we look at partners, they're looking for a vendor that has a comprehensive suite of solutions. At Kaspersky, we have a very comprehensive portfolio, starting from our endpoint and EDR solutions all the way through to hybrid cloud security and our cloud workload security suite. We also have solutions as it relates to threat intelligence as well as solutions for OT environments.

We also have XDR solutions as well, which extend beyond the endpoint. All of these solutions mean we have a comprehensive suite.

So, when partners look at vendors, the challenge that they see is, does that vendor have a comprehensive set of solution suites for their customers? And as it relates to our portfolio, we believe that we have innovative solutions and reliable solutions specifically to address this space.

But also from a partner's perspective, they want to engage with vendors that have a partner program that allows them to engage based on their business models.

So, we have the Kaspersky United Partner Program, which is globally recognized as being a program that is tailored based on the partner profile. We have the sell part of the program for those resellers that simply just want to sell the solution. We have another part of the program that is for system integrators that want to deploy, that want to be able to implement the solutions. And these are for system integrators and specialized cybersecurity partners.

We engage with these partners to be able to help them with strategic products. Then MSPs, MSSPs, want to be able to build their service offerings on a solution set. And we engage with those types of partners there as part of the United Partner Program.

Then we have the fourth set, which is the Technology Alliance Partners. How do they engage with a vendor to be able to embed our solutions effectively to support their business model as well? So, you know, I believe that with all of these different solutions and our world-class partner program, this is where we can actually help many of our partners across APAC.

With that said, are there specific markets you're looking at for the rest of the year and maybe next year as well in this region?

APAC is such a diverse region and when we look at economies like in Japan and Korea, they're engaging with us very much on threat intelligence-based solutions. When we look at some of the emerging economies, which we call the Asia Emerging Countries, these are essentially those emerging economies ranging from Philippines through to Sri Lanka, through to Bangladesh, Cambodia. We decided to focus on this because historically, these emerging economies are developing very quickly and they're embarking on the technology journey. And as it relates to this economy, we saw that they were very much still leveraging Kaspersky for our EDR and endpoint solutions.

But more recently, it's been developing into SIEM type of solutions. So we continue to engage with our partners in these economies around that. But some of the core markets such as Southeast Asia, India, and Greater China, we see that there is more of a demand and uptick in the industrial cybersecurity solutions where more organizations are seeing the need to have both IT as well as OT solutions and something that can encompass everything.

When you say customers are looking at security solutions that encompass IT and OT, there is also consolidation happening in the industry. So how is Kaspersky dealing with that consolidation approach that customers are taking?

In a recent Kaspersky study, we revealed that 72% of companies still rely on multi-vendor ecosystems.

This is despite the fact that 43% of security professionals find that their security stacks are overly complex. And 42% of organizations experience budget overruns attributed to these overlapping solutions. So, this leads to operational inefficiencies, resource strain and more importantly blind spots, critical blind spots.

Kaspersky is monitoring the solution as it relates to vendor consolidation and we're behind this. We feel that we need to make it simpler for our customers and improve the operational efficiency for our customers. So recently we just launched the Kaspersky Next XDR Optimum product to do exactly this.

As it relates to XDR, we have now a solution that is more for our enterprise set of customers that have security operations. They have a full soft team, they have the budget to be able to implement these types of solutions, and we have Kaspersky Next XDR Expo. And what we recently launched was Kaspersky Next XDR Optimum.

This is more tailored towards small and medium customers that still need to extend their protection beyond the endpoint. But at the same time, they may not have the full teams to be able to implement such solutions as the expert solution. So with Kaspersky Next XDR Optimum, this is more for small and mid-market customers.

And it does really consolidate different parts of the portfolio to make it much easier for them to implement such a product. So that's a new product that we just launched and we're seeing quite a high demand for this product once we've launched it.

With our industry, we're always quite short in terms of cybersecurity skill sets. And managed services and MSPs and MSSPs is critical to our growth. It's been growing quite quickly. So many customers and organizations find it quite challenging to retain staff. So they engage with MSPs and MSSPs to be able to manage their environments for them.

And if they are not able to find a suitable MSP or MSSP, Kaspersky has MDR solutions. And as a part of this XDR Optimum launch, we also launched our MXDR service, which is Managed Extended Detection Response.

Is Kaspersky working with a lot of MSPs and MSSPs right now already?

Absolutely. This has been a focus area for us over the last few years, and it's been growing significantly year on year. More and more MSPs and MSSPs are engaging with us. We have very different skill sets between some of the MSPs.

Some of them engage with us in building their service offerings as an MDR, leveraging our endpoint detection response products. Others engage with us because we have a comprehensive set of XDR solutions across IT and OT. One of our MSP partners that traditionally sold MDR has recently started to engage with us in OT environments as well.

Then also some of the partners in India have started to engage with us in implementing our Threat Intelligence to enrich their security operations so that they can manage their customers more effectively. So yeah, we do see that happening across APAC.

With that said, what are you hoping to see more from your partners?

What I hope to see from our partners across the region is for them to engage with us more effectively, collaborate with us, and understand how our solutions can help their customers. We continue to enable our partners across the solution sets ranging from IT through to OT, and we want to continue to help protect our customers jointly with our partners. So, this collaboration, getting enabled, getting trained on our solution sets across both IT and OT is something that will be what I hope to see in our engagement with partners moving forward.

We will also continue to deliver reliable innovative solutions and as it relates to our engagement model, we are a channel first company. We are committed to our partnerships, and we want to continue to engage with our partners as a partner first type of strategy. Then as it relates to the different focus areas and solutions, it continues to focus on IT and OT convergence.

We want to continue to engage with our partners on our threat intelligence offerings and as it relates to a Kaspersky Next portfolio that covers EDR solutions as well as XDR solutions. These are the three areas that we want to continue to engage with our partners on, and partners can expect that we'll be committed to them as long as they're interested and committed to working closely with Kaspersky to protect their customers.