Cybersecurity Insurer Provides MDR for MSPs

When it comes to offering advanced cybersecurity to end customers, MSPs typically rely on vendor-provided MDR or they partner with an MSSP. But a new kind of company has entered the MDR market in the last 12 months.

Cybersecurity insurance companies are rolling out their own stacks of cybersecurity services to customers, including enterprises and managed service providers. For instance, cybersecurity insurance giant Coalition offers a platform called Coalition Control. It’s essentially a vulnerability scanning and management platform. It comes in a multi-tenant version for MSPs.

The basic scan is offered as a freemium license that MSPs can use with customers to scan their IT estate for gaps. A deeper scan is available to Coalition policy holders or businesses that pay for the solution.

About a year ago, Coalition added to that offering — rolling out MDR services (managed detection and response) targeted at end customers and MSPs.

Coalition is not alone. For instance, Beazley Security, the cybersecurity services unit of the Beazley insurance company, has rolled out a managed XDR service.

ChannelE2E recently caught up with John Roberts, general manager of security at Coalition to talk about why and how an insurance company got into the cybersecurity services business.

Roberts was one of the first employees at the company when it started in 2017, having previously worked with cofounder Josh Motta at Cloudflare. Coalition was founded with a mission to provide comprehensive protection against cyber threats, combining insurance coverage with security tools and services. The services business is an outgrowth of the company’s roots in cybersecurity.

Coalition is currently working with 60 MSPs, Roberts said, and those companies include Harbor Networks and North Star Technology.

“We are offering services that help MSPs become MSSPs,” he said.

Why Does Coalition Offer Cybersecurity Services?

Coalition insures 80,000 organizations across four countries, Roberts said. A significant portion of these organizations are small businesses, which often rely on MSPs for their IT needs. This dependency has driven Coalition to develop tools that MSPs can use to enhance their service offerings and improve their clients’ security postures, according to Roberts.

With that in mind, Coalition introduced a managed detection and response (MDR) service in Q2 2023. Roberts says the service is a natural outgrowth of the company’s incident response services.

“Our customers were like, ‘You helped us on our worst day ever. We trust you. Can you please stick around?’” Roberts said.