With Acquisition, LogicNow Puts Dollar Figure on Security Risks

Opening what could be a new market opportunity for managed service providers, LogicNow recently acquired iScan Online Inc.

For now, LogicNow is primarily positioning the acquisition as a play for its IT professional customers. While many technologies perform automated vulnerability scanning, what's interesting about the iScan approach is that it focuses on quantifying the dollar value of at-risk data.

As an example, the tool hunts for personally identifiable information, such as Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers and credit card numbers within data-at-rest stores on servers and workstations.

Assigning a monetary risk to having such data exposed would make it far easier to build a business case to senior management for securing that data. Even though such monetary values must be arbitrary, an estimate that's based in real-world breaches would at least provide a legitimate starting point for setting appropriate priorities around properly securing the data. "Our mission is to help customers understand their risk to a data breach," explained former iScan CEO Carl Banzhof in the acquisition announcement.

Banzhof joins LogicNow as vice president of engineering, and will be part of the effort to build a new LogicNow product called MAX Risk Intelligence around the iScan product. For now, LogicNow customers who visit the MAX Risk Intelligence page are directed to download the existing iScan product.

LogicNow plans to integrate the forthcoming MAX Risk Intelligence product with its RMM tool -- MAX Remote Management.

It's easy to imagine how a product originally designed to help security officers protect their own corporate data and present budget requirements effectively to C-level executives would present a strong opportunity for MSPs to do security assessments with their clients and build slick business cases for new security-related projects.

Posted by Scott Bekker on March 03, 2016 at 12:06 PM