Guardz, founded in 2022 by CEO Dor Eisner and CTO Alon Lavi, is on a mission to streamline cybersecurity operations for MSPs. The all-in-one unified platform was purpose-built for MSPs to secure and insure their SMB customers against modern threats.
In this interview, Eisner explains how the company is redefining MDR, and why AI-driven automation will help MSPs stay ahead of attackers. Plus, he shares insights on Guardz’ roadmap, and why identity protection is the next cybersecurity frontier. Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
MSP Success: There’s a lot of cybersecurity platforms out there. Plus, the large RMM platform players have been adding cybersecurity. How does Guardz carve a niche in this world of consolidation?
Dor Eisner: Consolidation is the key word here. But the consolidation can be done in a good way only if you build it from the ground up as a consolidated platform. So all the giant RMMs acquired a lot of cybersecurity software. But it’s still silos, even if they bundle it into the same price list or in the same package.
And the challenge is, it’s not about the cost. It’s about the security efficiency, and the deployment, and the automated detection and response. And now [with Guardz] you can bring detections from different security controls and tie them into a single user and correlate it with the different threats into a fully automated response. And this is where Guardz is bringing innovation to the game. Because no one in the industry took the cloud identities, the emails, the devices, the awareness of the employees, the dark web scanning, the external exposure, and tied it into a single engine in a user-centric approach—and provide fully automated detection and response. Guard is the first unified security platform that took all the different security controls and streamlined it into a pureplay MSP [offering].
Obviously we are friends of all the other RMMs. We are integrated with all the big ones. We are actually adding a lot of value. If you want to trust in security, you should trust in the experts of security. The RMM players are great in doing RMMs. But if you want to put your cybersecurity efforts in someone that understands and built it from the ground up, Guardz is the way to go.
The threats of today are not about the hardware, they are more about the cloud and identities. So Guard is built for the cloud and it’s cloud native by design. Everything that we are doing is around connecting to your identity cloud and stuff like that. We are offering a different flavor of the future of MDR and doing it by design as a unified platform.
The threats of today and the threats of tomorrow are multilayer threats and they are targeting the identities and the users from all different angles and that’s why you need to be a platform by design.
MSP Success: Why did you decide to include cyber insurance in your offering?
Eisner: We are not underwriting the policies. We decided to partner with a single carrier and to do it fully streamlined into the platform in order to improve the risk of the customers and the loss ratio of the carrier. We can get all the data to the carrier, and based on that, we can get better pricing, better coverage for the end clients, while the carrier sleeps good at night knowing that Guardz is in place.
MSP Success: Do you have a formal partner program?
Eisner: We are a partner company by design. We have a specific section in the product where MSPs can get business review reports and prospecting reports and collateral and brand everything with their logo. [Onboarding and training] are complementary. We are doing one-on-one onboarding, white glove support for the MSPs. We are also providing a community package that is free for the MSP to use for his own business and adding clients as he goes. So it’s pay as you go and everything is very MSP friendly.
MSP Success: How many MSPs are you working with today? And are you going to expand to sell direct to the enterprise?
Eisner: We are getting close to 500 MSPs. We are going to stay with the MSP forever. We believe that this is the best way to protect the backbone of the economy—small businesses.
MSP Success: You just announced the Ultimate Plan for MSPs in January that includes SentinelOne. Given that your platform already had endpoint protection, why did you decide to integrate SentinelOne?
Eisner: We had our own EDR that we developed on top of the freemium edition of Microsoft Defender. But it’s not the same level of quality as SentinelOne. Our agent is great for the basic package of Guardz. [With] the Ultimate Plan we are not just providing SentinelOne, we are connecting the dots across email identities and devices, users, awareness, data, and everything in between that is protecting the small business in a way that enterprises protect their environment. We are just helping MSPs with a unified platform that is fully automated by design with best-of-class EDR from SentinelOne.
MSP Success: A lot of MSPs don’t have SentinelOne because it’s expensive. How are you able to make this affordable?
Eisner: SentinelOne invested in Guardz. And by the way, it’s not just about the cost; it’s more about the complexity. SentinelOne is a very complex product to manage and deploy. We simplified the SentinelOne deployment, threat detection automation, and remediation into the Guardz platform and everything is done in the click of a button. And also the price is pretty affordable. The Ultimate package price list is about $7 per user per month, including SentinelOne, including Guardz, including your protection, including everything. Everything is streamlined from the same subscription, from the same deployment, from the same dashboard. And it’s all Guardz. And on top of that, the MDR offering [is] part of the Ultimate package.
MSP Success: Security is a moving target. What should MSPs be thinking about for their customers in 2025?
Eisner: MSPs should think about the operational labor of managing cybersecurity for the clients. This is going to be more complicated and more time-consuming in the future. That’s why Guardz is investing a lot in AI agents and how to connect the dots and to create an automated remediation so the MSP can sleep at night knowing that Guardz is there, not just from a platform perspective, but also from a 24/7 fully automated detection and response. This is where we see the market is going. Toward AI and toward automating the operational stuff of cybersecurity for small businesses.
MSP Success: Are there any particular threats that you’re watching?
Eisner: Absolutely. The market is shifting from ransomware … to more account compromise, tokens stolen, data leakage, around small businesses. It was mainly the trend that happened in the enterprise market in the last three 4-5 years and now we are seeing the same trend going down into small businesses where the bad actor can access the network and silently sit in the network for a few days, a few weeks, and can actually take something that is very important at the right time. Where the target isn’t even aware.
We are seeing a lot of attacks like fraud and money transferring and we are thinking that more and more attacks will be around identities, the cloud environment and the data.
MSP Success: Is identity the next frontier that MSPs need to think about protecting?
Eisner: Absolutely. We started with the cloud identity. Then we added the external exposure, the emails, because it’s all connected together as we see it. It’s all like one mesh of detection coming into one engine and then we are able to connect the dots.
MSP Success: Do you ever anticipate being acquired by a bigger platform company?
Eisner: No, we want to be independent. We, the founders, already did a few exits before, so we are not about selling the company. We are about building something that is going to be meaningful and protecting millions of businesses. That’s the goal.
MSP Success: What’s on your road map?
Eisner: More use cases, more detections, more automations, and really doubling down on the AI in detection and response in order to reduce the mean time to detect, the mean time to respond. This is the critical stuff of getting on top of a cyberattack. And that’s mainly the investment, around the technology and getting more use cases into the platform.
MSP Success: What have you been hearing from your MSP advisory board about what else they’d like to see from Guardz?
Eisner: There is a lot of excitement around how cyber insurance is being provided to the clients. There is a lot of excitement about the reports, like the compliance report, because we have all the data baked into the platform. We have some functionality on reporting, but we are going to extend this functionality and add a lot of reporting capabilities in 2025.
