Here’s a partnership that shows that sometimes integrated solutions deliver benefits that standalone solutions cannot

Corvil is a monitoring company. In a slightly confusing twist of semantics, however, Corvil doesn’t say that but rather talks about how it delivers analytics over network data. While some might accuse me of over-simplifying things, in my books that means that they’re a monitoring company. That seems to be a fair assessment as far as customers go – Corvil has huge market share in the financial sector and is justifiably proud of the (admittedly unverifiable) statistic that they inspect 354 trillion messages with a daily transaction value of over $1 trillion. Big numbers aside, it seems clear that Corvil is an important monitoring tool for financial entities.

For its part, Endgame calls itself a “converged endpoint security platform.” Again the important thing to note here isn’t the machinations of how vendors differentiate themselves in the marketplace, but rather than Endgame has a history of unifying prevention and detection to to help organizations stop targeted attacks before they can result in information loss.

Endgame was founded in 2008 and has raised close to $100 million in venture funding, while Corvil is the granddaddy, having been founded in 2000 and raised just over $40 million from their own list of venture capitalists.

The start of a beautiful relationship?

So why are the two vendors appearing together in a single blog post? Well it seems the two have just signed a partnership that aims to combine detection, visibility and protection. This is one of those deals that makes, at the very least, perfect sense from a conceptual level: by tying visibility directly to the platform that is charged with resolving security issues, the theory goes that organizations will be better protected, and there is less risk of time delays between the dodgy data being ingested, and the detection of malicious activity actually occurring.

By combining live intelligence from packet analysis with endpoint protection across and the endpoint’s kernel and memory, the partnership offers what both vendors suggest is the deepest visibility yet. It promises to enable security teams to detect more, sooner; automate investigation; and determine and execute a precision response. The utility of the combination is pointed out by the (admittedly somewhat biased!) CEO of Endgame, Nate Fick;

The techniques attackers use today are increasingly aggressive, complex, and difficult to detect. Security solutions that only identify customer breaches after damage and loss are no longer acceptable. Corvil shares our philosophy of direct, aggressive protection. Extending the visibility we can offer customers across the network and endpoint represents the most comprehensive solution available on the market

The guts of the dual offering

In terms of what these two vendors jointly provide, the combined offering covers:

  • Continuous threat detection and response
  • Automated alert triage
  • Streamlined investigation
  • Automated threat hunting

The requisite dose of bot goodness

Of course, these two vendors don’t work in a vacuum and are hence drawn to the buzzwords and industry trend du jour. It will hardly come a s a surprise, therefore, to hear that recently, each company has launched chatbot / virtual expert solutions within their applications. For many, the offering of a chatbot is a tickbox that is close to mandatory. This integration covers the bot-offerings of the respective vendors – Endgame’s Artemis and Corvil’s Cara – and offers the benefit of the joint intelligence across both product’s areas of knowledge.

Pragmatism or a cop-out?

Of course the question here is whether it is better for a single vendor to offer the closed-loop of monitoring plus remediation, or whether a combined offering of discrete best-of-breed solutions is better. In justifying the partnership, the vendors each opine that the different backgrounds and unique approaches of the two companies illustrate the rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape as it innovates to meet the ever-increasing volume and complexity of global cyber attacks. Corvil executive David Murray goes further:

Cybersecurity is an urgent priority for all industries and requires companies to leverage the best learnings and experiences for protection. By combining Endgame’s heritage in protecting against nation-state adversaries with Corvil’s longstanding leadership in safeguarding algorithmic businesses, we, uniquely, provide critical capabilities that our customers across industries require. Today’s partnership with Endgame enables us to cover a wider spectrum of an organization’s infrastructure and empower today’s overburdened security teams.

Of course your determination about whether this is indeed a “better together” situation will depend on a number of variables. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and it will be interesting to see the only metric that matters, customer buy-in.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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