How Kroll’s Partner Program Is Delivering Lifetime Returns

Hello and welcome, I'm your host Katie Bavoso from The Channel Company, coming to you with the latest news from Kroll Cyber Risk. Earlier this year, Kroll launched its first channel partner program, the Kroll Cyber Partner Program. Kroll's unique portfolio of end-to-end cyber risk solutions promises partners a different way to grow their businesses and their bottom lines. For more on this, I'm now joined by Keith Carter, Global Head of Channel and Alliances at Kroll Cyber Risk. Welcome, Keith. Great to see you. Hi, Katie. Thanks for inviting me. Great to see you too. As you know, the cybersecurity and cyber risk markets are crowded. What differentiates Kroll as a vendor in this space? We need to go back about 40 years when Kroll really started as a digital forensics and investigation and response company, doing some of the world's most complex, complex ransomware and breach notification challenges. And through those years, Kroll has, with their 3,000 IR engagements a year, developed an immense amount of Threat Intelligence, and that's Threat Intelligence that takes years and years to get, but we feed all of that intelligence back into everything Kroll does, from DFIR, to our Managed Detection and Response, to our Pen Testing, pretty much everything that's needed to protect our clients. Keith, why did Kroll decide to launch the Kroll Cyber Partner Program and what value and potential do you see in the channel? With all this threat intelligence, the experience, the practitioners that we've got with years and years experience, it's only as good as getting it out into the hands of customers who desperately need this information to protect their security infrastructure. Allowing our partners to have access to this is really just going to scale quicker. The threat actors do not sleep. We have to be in front of them, we've got to be ahead of where they are. So we opened up the channel to really give scale and it give channel access, access to the threat intelligence, access to the technology and access to the people. And we also understand that our partners, sometimes they do a little bit about what we do, and that's absolutely fine. We find our own swim lanes with our partners. So if there's a swim lane that they don't currently have at a very, very low cost of entry, they can bring Kroll in, in an uncompetitive situation, and give that access to their customers. Why should channel providers partner with Kroll right now? What makes your partner program different and more profitable for partners? Why now? Because the bad actors do not sleep, as I said earlier. We have to get that information to as many people as possible, the technology and the people. But also, having spent my career both with vendors and having my own reseller business, I always look at these programs and say, well, what's in it for me? How can I make money? How can I reach more customers? How can I get more share of spend from existing customers? And the Kroll Partner Program has a very, very unique and I think compelling lifetime value. We have partners already, and even in the last six months. Land with a dollar, and that customer is now spending 10x dollars over six months. We land with a tabletop, or a pen test, or a breach itself. And then AR revenue follows with the MDR capabilities and the annual pen testing as well. So it's a lifetime value game. It's the gift that keeps on giving. And when you have three year annuity business coming into your company, you can build on that. So I know the program itself is still fresh, new, but what new or recent investments have you made in your partner program and what developments can partners expect to see from Kroll in the future? So we recently launched our managed service provider specialization that sits within the program. We've had a lot of MSPs come to us and say, we don't have cyber in our portfolio, or maybe we do a little bit of cyber. But at the moment, the cost of ownership for us, so the cost of retaining talent, the cost of getting talent It's becoming quite prohibitive. So a lot of our smaller partners who are serving our SMB clients are saying, it's cheaper to outsource to Kroll. We get the value of Kroll, the brand of Kroll, the international experience and coverage of Kroll, and then what the partners end up doing is they turn their, what was a cost to their business, employees doing more of the reactive side, into revenue generating professional service employees. So it becomes pretty much a balance sheet conversation. That is one of the advantages that the Kroll partner program brings. And secondly, the other enhancement is we've just launched our Microsoft O365 monitoring capabilities. So this is now taking all the intelligence, all the experience, all