Bromium Revamps Endpoint Security Strategy to Focus on Channel

Bromium, a provider of a lightweight hypervisor that isolates endpoints from cybersecurity attacks, announced updates to its Partner Network that add dedicated sales, marketing, and technical support to channel partners. In addition, Bromium also announced it is now committed to a 100 percent indirect sales model.

That move coincides with a revamp of the company’s core technology to make it more accessible to both midmarket IT organizations and the channel partners that serve them, says Bromium CEO Gregory Webb.

Previously, the Bromium Secure Platform required a level of expertise to deploy that is rare on IT circles, says Webb. But since signing an OEM relationship with HP, Inc. the company began re-engineering the technology used to deploy its hypervisor, says Webb. The Bromium hypervisor can now be applied across millions of HP, Inc. endpoints in a way channel partners can easily service, says Webb.

“Before it was really something only the military or intelligence agency would have had the resources to deploy,” says Webb.

Bromium is trying to change the cybersecurity conversation by focusing on helping organizations resolve cybersecurity problems in favor of preventing their occurrence from ever happening. The Bromium hypervisor provides a layer of isolation at the hardware level underneath the operating system that prevents malware from spreading. Included in the Bromium platform is a containerization and application control capability that can be employed to create a sandbox to identify both existing and new types of malware, says Webb.

In general, Webb contends threat hunting is a dying business because cybercriminals continue to become more sophisticated, which makes identifying threats increasingly difficult. The only real effective option is to isolate operating systems and applications in a way that eliminates the need to hunt for threats because malware can no longer spread beyond the infected endpoint. Once discovered, application programming interfaces (APIs) then make it possible to share that threat information with third-party security information event management (SIEM) platforms.

While partners can resell the Bromium Secure Platform, Webb says that increasingly partners are looking to build managed services based on the company’s core software. In fact, Webb notes that partners now account for 70 percent of the company’s revenue.

Webb says channel partners will soon need to distinguish between merely treating malware infections versus providing an actual cure to the problem. Customers are increasingly signaling their frustration with existing investments in cybersecurity that don’t eliminate the core problem, says Webb.

It’s too early to say how willing organizations might be to try a new approach to endpoint security. But given a rising sense that the cybersecurity war is being lost channel partners might want to, at the very least, expand their cybersecurity portfolios to include a different approach to an age-old problem that now plagues the entire IT industry.