Industry Voice: Ahead of XChange EMEA, eSentire's International Director talks ambitions, cyber trends and 2025 priorities

As XChange EMEA approaches, Phil Skelton, International Director at eSentire discusses the vendor's 2025 vision in this exclusive Q&A. From scaling cybersecurity innovation to strengthening channel relationships, discover how the firm plans to navigate emerging threats, empower partners, and solidify its position as a trusted provider in an ever-evolving landscape.

What has been one highlight of 2024 for eSentire?

eSentire introduced Atlas Agent for endpoint protection and co-deployment for endpoint bypass, expanding out total addressable market/serviceable addressable market towards the SMB segment and distribution market. eSentire is consolidating, future proofing, and eliminating the risk of vendor lock-in. Our offerings are simplified per endpoint pricing, enabling greater scoping, positioning and autonomy in our channel.

What are your top three strategic priorities for the year ahead?

  1. eSentire is expanding TAM, meeting customer needs in the SMB and enterprise space with new packaging and service models
  2. eSentire is continuing to open its XDR platform with over 300 integrations, and self serve APIs, making us the ideal partner to optimize your existing tech investments with asset/vulnerability context, prevent vendor lock in and future proof emerging investments
  3. eSentire is working alongside its partners showing them how they can leverage the growth of the cloud marketplaces, where end-customers have committed spend. eSentire is meeting our partners and their customers in the cloud marketplaces. eSentire’s value proposition is especially strong for partners delivering managed services. No matter where our partners need eSentire to round out their technology stack, eSentire can deliver because our solutions snap in easily.

What has been the defining trend or event in cybersecurity in 2024, in your opinion?

Generative AI has been the most talked about subject in 2024 and how it can be used to launch sophisticated cyberattacks against organisations but also how it can be used as part of a cyber security solution to defend organisations from attacks and provide valuable insights into an attack.

In reference to threat actors using AI systems to launch more sophisticated attacks against organisations – witness the attack on British company Arup’s finance team with multiple deepfake characters, as well as more mundane approaches like improving copy in phishing emails. However, GenAI is also being used by cyber security teams to improve their security processes and improve their attack defenses. For example, with GenAI you can automate your steps around providing valuable insights into attack paths or mitigating a threat. This can make your security teams more efficient, enabling them to resolve more incidents than would be possible previously. GenAI is also a valuable tool for security teams that want to bring junior staff up to speed faster.

What is one trend in managed detection and response you expect to carry over into the year ahead?

For MDR as a category, we will see more evolution around Generative AI and how these systems can be applied. Alongside the general pattern of attackers and defenders using GenAI in their work patterns, companies will need more help in how they manage their AI deployments. The official deployments are starting to get embedded in businesses, as they move from pilot phases and into production, and those projects need security and compliance support wrapped around them.

eSentire was one of the first cybersecurity companies in the market to recognize that organisations would need help in how they managed their AI deployments. Thus, in 2023, eSentire launched the LLM Gateway, an open-source implementation framework that helps security teams better govern and monitor the use of Large Learning Models (LLMs) internally. Continuing to build out our GenAI security offerings, in June 2024, eSentire introduced the cybersecurity industry’s first solution providing complete Generative AI visibility.

Leveraging security telemetry across an organization’s log and network data sources, eSentire’s MDR for GenAI Visibility solution provides daily insights into an organization’s use of GenAI technology, including the most frequently used AI applications, the users of the technology, the prompts, and the files shared. With this intelligence, end-user companies can measure the organizational risks presented by GenAI and LLM usage, while ensuring adherence to their corporate GenAI policies. Our partners and their end customers showed significant interest in the GenAI security solution in 2024. We expect the adoption rate to grow even more in 2025, when we extend the functionality of our MDR for GenAI Visibility solution to include threat hunting, investigation and complete response.

What changes should partners look out for in eSentire's partner programme in 2025?

We have simplified our pricing model to give more autonomy to the partner in terms of scoping and simplified transparent per endpoint pricing that makes it predictable for them and their customers. This brings more speed and control to the transaction – showcasing their Authority in MDR, alongside us as their partner. Our Partners have access to three pre-defined MDR Service tiers that are built to deliver the cyber security outcomes their end-customers are looking to achieve, regardless if the end-customer is an SMB, a Mid-Market organisation, or an Enterprise. Each of the tiers have been designed to fulfil our service promise of Building Resilience to Prevent Business Disruption. Each tier includes:

Alongside our Managed Detection & Response services, we are working on our Continuous Threat Exposure management services and how partners can embed these offers in their product offers.

As part of this, our partners will have access to several defined pre-packaged solutions that will deliver what their customers want to achieve. Alongside this, we are working on more programmes for the markets that we serve and have experience in, so that we can help our partners increase their sector expertise and delivery, and equally they can help us reach new markets that fit alongside our current ones. This is a real two-way street where we can learn and develop.

This post was sponsored by eSentire.