Redinet’s Search for a Better Security Vendor Led to WatchGuard
Challenge
Redinet Limited is an MSP with more than 25 years of experience providing exceptional IT services for businesses in the UK. In their early years, they set out to find a vendor to resolve their pain points around firewalls. “Support was a big problem with our previous firewall vendor, as was the reliability of advanced features such as clustering; and even simple tasks such as replacing a firewall was a horrible, complicated, and laborious process,” said James McMillan, CTO of Redinet. “Not to mention you also had to buy your product, varying levels of support, and then you’d buy your add-on modules and everything else. The process was quite tough, and the competitor never really wanted to get behind us with deals. No visibility whatsoever,” added Colin Bridle, director of Redinet.
With endpoint security, Redinet initially used a vendor for 15+ years but felt compelled to switch due to the complexity of the administration and support. “When security products are complex to administer, customers can make mistakes,” stated McMillan.
Solution
“I was told about WatchGuard’s purchase of Panda, which I (mistakenly) believed was aimed at small businesses, so I dismissed it - but one of my WatchGuard contacts persuaded me to take another look. After evaluating again, I was really impressed by the levels of functionality and depth in terms of telemetry/threat hunting provided by the base product, so we started using it internally,” recalled McMillan.
Next came Advanced EPDR/Orion, which as a product set, hadn’t yet been incorporated into the WatchGuard portfolio - but came up during a search on the subject. “When I came across this great threat hunting and remediation platform, I thought this is brilliant. This is potentially what we’re after. I hadn’t heard of it before, so I scrolled down the page, saw the WatchGuard logo, and immediately emailed our account manager,” said McMillan. “He responded, saying you’ve discovered our great secret.”
McMillan added, “I dug into the platform a little more and liked the extra functionality afforded within (now known as) WatchGuard for SOC, which includes some of the advanced detection functions. In addition, the fact that we can keep telemetry for a year, whereas most of the competition will keep them for maybe 30, 60, or 90 days if you pay extra, was enticing. We realized it was a great product and that we should move forward with it to provide our threat hunting, detection, and response security services – which greatly helps reduce risk within our customers’ organizations.”
Results
The ease of administration within the WatchGuard portfolio has allowed Redinet to streamline its technical processes to provide enterprise-grade cybersecurity services. They’ve adopted additional WatchGuard products and installed them in many customer businesses with great success. “In terms of supporting our customers, we have hundreds of Fireboxes out there, with a large percentage being managed centrally, which we couldn’t do as easily before with other vendors. This ability, along with a single pane to manage endpoint security over thousands of devices, saves us so much time and complexity,” said McMillan.
Commenting on Fireboxes in particular, McMillan stated, “In the early days, WatchGuard was a dream in comparison. Honestly, everything was much simpler in every aspect, from deployment through to recovery if needed, so we all became converts very quickly.”
“With WatchGuard, we buy the ‘Total Security’ package, and it’s done. We don’t need to worry about anything else. With some of the competitors, you’re buying six or seven different lines on the bill of materials just to get the same thing you get on one line with WatchGuard,” said Bridle.
“We were developing a wrap-around service, so having a range of products with network and endpoint security for us to standardize on has meant that it has become easier to put a package together that we absolutely believe in, that the sales guys believe in and all the technical guys too,” concluded Bridle. “Regardless of who you speak to here at Redinet, we all believe that the WatchGuard products are the right ones for us to be going out to market with.”