‘Cybercriminals aren’t stopping at the inbox anymore. They’re compromising user accounts and then moving laterally through Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive because those environments often don’t have the same level of visibility or protection that email does. We wanted to close that gap and give MSPs the ability to see those attacks as they’re happening and respond from one platform,’ says Zack Schwartz, vice president of strategic partnerships at Trustifi.
The new platform extends the New York-based vendor’s email-grade security capabilities across Microsoft 365 collaboration applications, which gives MSPs a way to detect sensitive data, enforce security policies, monitor activity and investigate incidents across multiple customer environments.
“This really came directly from feedback from our MSP partners and from real-world incidents we’ve seen over and over again,” Zack Schwartz (pictured), vice president of strategic partnerships at Trustifi, told CRN in an exclusive interview. “Trustifi has traditionally been known for inbound email filtering and data loss prevention, but what we discovered is that email is only one piece of today’s attack surface. Cybercriminals aren’t stopping at the inbox anymore. They’re compromising user accounts and then moving laterally through Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive because those environments often don’t have the same level of visibility or protection that email does. We wanted to close that gap and give MSPs the ability to see those attacks as they’re happening and respond from one platform.”
[Related: Trustifi Names Former Mimecast, Dell Exec Jeff Spridgeon As CEO: Exclusive]
As organizations rely more on Microsoft 365 tools to share files and communicate, attackers are exploiting internal accounts to spread malware and reach sensitive data, he said. And many MSPs struggle because they lack visibility into those environments.
“The biggest challenge is that things are happening inside Microsoft 365 that administrators don’t always know about,” he said. “It’s everything from accidental sharing of confidential files to compromised accounts being used to distribute malware across an organization. Once an attacker gets inside, they’re trying to reach privileged users and ultimately gain access to the most valuable systems. Collaboration Shield gives MSPs visibility into those activities, helps them establish the right policies, identifies sensitive information and automates responses before those situations become much larger security incidents.”
The platform supports more than 70 built-in sensitivity types including personally identifiable information, financial records, health-care data, passwords, API keys and private credentials.
“Everything we’ve built is MSP-first,” he said. “It’s fully multi-tenant, so partners can move, copy or apply policies across one customer or hundreds of customers at the same time. We’ve also introduced industry templates based on best practices gathered from our partner community. Whether you’re supporting health care, financial services or legal clients, those templates allow partners to deploy quickly without having to build policies from scratch every single time.”
That centralized platform also gives MSPs one place to manage email and collaboration security, making it easier to investigate and respond to threats. Partners can also trace an attack from the initial email into Teams or SharePoint, see where it spread, identify affected users and take action, all from a single interface.
And Schwartz added that Collaboration Shield can be a significant revenue opportunity for partners.
“This is a natural add-on for our existing MSP partners,” he said. “Thousands of customers already use Trustifi through our channel, so adding collaboration security creates an easy upsell while giving clients a much more complete view of their cyber resilience.”
Looking ahead, the road map includes expanding the platform into Google environments and potentially Slack. The company is also investing in AI-powered security awareness training that uses real user behavior to create personalized training.
Schwartz said the road map is being driven directly by MSP partner feedback, with advisory groups helping shape what Trustifi builds next.
For Moses Castillo, vice president of operations at Trustifi partner TekEfficient, the new platform strengthens an already successful relationship.
“We’re focused on helping businesses get the most value from their technology, and partnering with Trustifi makes that easy for us,” he said. “Being able to bring multiple email security capabilities together into one platform that’s simple to manage is a huge advantage. It allows us to deliver better protection while making things easier for both our team and our end-user clients.”
Castillo said one of the biggest reasons Denver-based TekEfficient continues to work with Trustifi is the vendor’s responsiveness.
“The support has been outstanding,” he told CRN. “We were just talking about how much communication matters. Whether it’s engineering, frontline sales or technical support, they’re incredibly responsive. That makes it very easy to do business with them.”
Looking ahead, he believes the Collaboration Shield platform will help accelerate his company’s growth.
“It’s going to help us grow because it allows us to deliver on our promise to customers,” he said. “We’re bringing additional value to our clients through the technology we’re offering, and that’s something every MSP is looking for.”
