Security vendor Menlo launches UK partner programme

Menlo providers isolation products designed to stop web and email threats

Isolation security vendor Menlo Security has launched its first UK partner programme as it looks to steal market share from the likes of FireEye.

Menlo Security offers an isolation platform that opens websites and emails in a secure cloud-based container, keeping the active content away from the end-user device and only rendering a copy of the content.

While Menlo already has a presence in the UK, this its first official partner programme and Paul Davis, EMEA VP at Menlo, told CRN that there is no upper limit for the amount of partners he is looking to recruit to the UK channel ecosystem, which currently has 12 partners.

"We are absolutely looking for more partners," he said.

"We don't have a set limit; it's more about what is appropriate for both [potential partners] and us.

"We're not a mass-market product, I think we will be in years to come, but we're looking for those partners that are technically astute and looking for something to differentiate themselves and those that are looking to build a service.

"There is a real play for those that are offering some form of managed services and using Menlo as part of that overall solution."

Who are they?

Based in California and founded in 2013, Menlo Security was born out of a project at the University of California, Berkley, and came out of stealth in 2015 to a $25m round of series B funding.

The firm was founded Amir Ben-Efraim and Poornima DeBolle who both worked at Juniper

Networks following its acquisition of Altor Networks in 2010.

Menlo has almost 100 employees worldwide including an EMEA team of 23, based in London.

Davis, who joined having set up FireEye's European operation during a four-year spell at the vendor, said that there are plans to recruit more developers for the UK team - but added that partner recruitment is more important.

"One thing I want to avoid doing is the classic American approach which is if it's going well, put more and more of your own people in different countries," he said.

"Having been a reseller years ago and having gone through the good and the bad with different vendors - the only way to build a successful company in Europe and the Middle East is through partners, so you have to be 100 per cent focused on that."

Menlo's high-profile client list includes JP Morgan, the UK government and Macey's in the US; as well as a number of finance and legal firms. Fujitsu is also both a partner and customer.

What they do?

Menlo's products works by isolating content from the internet in a container and then displaying a replica of the content on the end-point device meaning that no live content is on the end-point.

IT departments can limit the amount of actions that users can make - for example they may wish to allow users to open emails but not click through to any links, in which case only the text and images will be rendered.

The idea of isolation is not a new concept, but Davis said that the difference between Menlo and its competitors - the likes of Citrix, Bromium and Fireglass - is that there is no need to install an agent on the end-point device, so productivity is not impacted.

Menlo will look to displace proxy vendors and also reduce the market share of sandbox vendors like FireEye.

While Davis said that Menlo would not be suitable replace anti-virus software, he explained that his recommendation to businesses is to install Menlo first to "take away some of the noise", meaning customers can make a more informed decision on which next-generation end-point security vendor to use.

Channel strategy

Davis said he made a conscious effort to make the Menlo partner programme simpler than those of other vendors but having just two tiers - Authorised, which gives resellers credentials to sell Menlo products; and Select, for resellers with a specific focus and investment in Menlo.

Menlo will operate 100 per cent channel model, Davis said, and is looking to recruit a range of partner types.

"We've got organisations from the large systems integrators down to the breach responders, across to the small niche resellers and one-man bands," he said. "They all play a part.

"The beauty is I can take the solution to a large bank like JP Morgan which is 150,000 users; I can take it to a legal firm of 500 users; or I can take it to our smallest customer in the UK which is 10 [users].

"It resonates across the board so different partners have different requirements and I'm pretty certain we can support all of them."

Menlo has been distributed in the UK for the last nine months by Ignition - which is actively looking to help Menlo build on its UK partner base.

Sean Remnant CSO at Ignition, said: "They address the two largest attack vectors in the internet - the web threat and the email threat," he said.

"Everyone knows that security is a layered approach and I think isolation is a pretty good approach to reducing the attack surfaces for those two vectors.

"The other thing is it's a massive opportunity for the partners and resellers who have been used to selling Blue Coat and Forcepoint as a proxy solution for a web-based threat, but those solutions leave a load of bad stuff behind, typically what they call uncategorised websites."

What the analysts say

In a report published last year Gartner claimed that web isolation and remote browsing is "one of the most significant ways an enterprise can reduce the ability of web-based attacks on users to cause damage".

It claimed that by 2021 20 per cent of enterprises will use solutions that isolate internet activity, compared to less than one per cent in 2016.

Gartner picked out Menlo alongside five other vendors as market leaders - two of which were acquired last year, after Aurionpro and Digital Guardian acquired Spikes Security and Armor5 respectively.

The other three vendors listed were Authentic8, Light Point Security and Fireglass.

Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst Quocirca, told CRN that despite there being a handful of vendors taking a similar approach when it comes to isolation, Menlo has put itself in a strong position by basing its solution on the server, not the end point.

"There are quite a few vendors in the space that have various approaches to it and they've all got slightly different plays," he said.

"I know Bromium in particular does containerisation of almost everything that happens on the desktop and one of the criticisms of it is that is has performance overheads because you're using quite a lot of resources on the containers themselves.

"A problem with that would be that you'd have to have it on different device types which is a problem for Bromium, but [Menlo are] doing it all on the server so that doesn't matter because the web pages will only open on the web server."