Cybersecurity Partners. PHOTO: Cybercrime Magazine.

Cybersecurity Company Goes All-In On Partners

SafeGuard Cyber is a “100 percent channel business”

David Braue

Melbourne, Australia – Aug. 12, 2021

Partnerships are, naturally, built on relationships — but how do those relationships change when a global pandemic forces them to be conducted completely online?

Attendees at this month’s Black Hat USA 2021 conference finally had the chance to find out, returning to Las Vegas for the first time in two years to revive strategic partnerships and sales relationships that had been kept exclusively online.

Coming to fruition as growing vaccination numbers telegraph the steady return to somewhat normal activities, the hacking convention was a welcome change after a year of disruption in which Black Hat 2020 was pushed completely online.

This year’s event took on a more familiar look with a hybrid approach combining four days of face-to-face training with two days of virtual and in-person briefings.

Three days at Black Hat had provided the opportunity for “several terrific partner events face-to-face,” Karen Kukoda, vice president of strategic partnerships with collaboration, chat, and social media security platform SafeGuard Cyber, told Cybercrime Radio.



After many months apart, Kukoda said, the opportunity to conduct business face-to-face again had opened up new opportunities for interactions “not just with partners, but in meeting prospects, and customers, and talking about all these amazing partnerships that we’re putting in place today.”

With a little help from their friends

Recently listed as one of the cybersecurity industry’s 10 hottest channel programs to watch this year, SafeGuard Cyber’s Illuminate program reflects the company’s unusual positioning as a 100 percent channel company.

The company’s decision to sell exclusively through partners, Kukoda previously told Cybercrime Magazine, “is about stopping business communication compromise — and this is an emerging threat that our partners want to help provide a comprehensive solution for.”

SafeGuard Cyber’s channel program currently includes strategic partners such as CrowdStrike, Seismic, and insurance provider Resilience, which are integrated into the SafeGuard Cyber platform to create “additional security controls and functions.”

Illuminate guides the company’s engagement with partners who, the company promises, benefit from competitive margins, enhanced service offerings, and increased customer demand fuelled by strategic marketing and joint selling strategies.

The Illuninate portal allows partners to enter and track job opportunities and access sales-enablement tools, supporting relationships that often begin in-person at events including Black Hat, but continue to evolve through the same kind of online collaboration that SafeGuard Cyber’s solutions protect.

Technology partners participating in the Illuminate program include Salesforce and Slack; with a host of value-added resellers (VARs) including Consortium Networks, NuHarbor Security, Taborda Solutions, Wyldlynx, Optiv, and others.

“It’s always that ‘better together’ story,” Kokoda said. “We complement each other; they want to decrease risks, and we help protect their customers with extra security. And while today our partners resell our solution, in the future many will offer services to help our customers remove these threats from their environments.”

David Braue is an award-winning technology writer based in Melbourne, Australia.

Go here to read all of David’s Cybercrime Magazine articles.


Sponsored by SafeGuard Cyber

In 2014, our founders realized businesses and governments were leaving the traditional security perimeter to adopt transformational digital and social media channels. They built SafeGuard Cyber as an intelligent system to systematically identify and take action against risks in these communication channels, at scale. We believe the security paradigm must shift to redefine these digital channels as the first line of defense. Today, we help companies detect threats in real time, defend their organizations, and automate information governance across all of their digital channels.