In this Channel Partners TV interview, I spoke with ESET director of channel sales for North America Christina Walker about the new ESET Protect portfolio that uses AI to deliver cybersecurity-as-a-service.
The ESET Protect portfolio includes Protect Core to secure AI stacks, Protect Premium for MDR and Protect Ultimate that enables live contact with ESET’s threat-hunting team and delivers threat analysis.
“We're moving beyond just the traditional endpoint security conversation,” Walker said. “We're bringing together the prevention, the detection and response, threat intelligence, managed services and AI assisted capabilities in a portfolio that really can help service partners adapt to different customer needs. What makes this especially relevant now is because of the gap between the sophistication of today's threats versus the resources that many organizations have or don't have available to defend themselves.”
AI is a crucial piece of cybersecurity today, both as a tool to help protect customer data but also as a way that attackers improve their efficiency.
“My piece of advice is not to treat AI as a completely separate category of a threat,” Walker said. “It's not. It's really accelerating existing challenges that are there today. For example, attackers can research targets. They can create convincing social engineering, adapt to malicious content, automate activity much faster. That means the fundamentals of cybersecurity matter more, not less. So partners really should be helping customers reduce the attack surfaces, patch vulnerabilities, and protect identities while maintaining reliable backups and putting strong detection and response capabilities into place.”
She said ESET’s main priorities are enhancing partner profitability, training partners’ technical and sales teams, and enabling deeper alignment with partners.
“When I came on board to ESET over a year ago, I hit the ground running on the road and met with many partners,” Walker said. “I literally wasn't home for three months. And my focus was around understanding their business, what's going to drive them, where are their priorities, and what's their growth ambitions in order to really understand and model that into how my team should be supporting them moving forward.
“I really want to move from an operational and transactional business with our partners to better understanding business models, capabilities, and their growth ambitions to translate that into mutual plans of benefits where we can win together in the market.”
There’s much more in the video at the top of the page.