Solutions Granted CEO: Success Comes From ‘Not Doing Things The Way They Were Always Done’

‘Trying to stay nimble, trying to stay ahead of the curve,’ Michael Crean, CEO of Solutions Granted, says are the keys to helping the master MSSP’s customers. ‘[We’re also] learning from the past that can guide us to the future and really trying to embrace the cloud more.’

Michael Crean, CEO of master MSSP and global cybersecurity MSP Solutions Granted, said he expects to see somewhere between 50 percent and 60 percent growth in 2022, the same growth the company experienced last year.

Solutions Granted, based in Woodbridge, Va., provides SOC as a Service, MDR for endpoint, MDR for cloud, network security, vulnerability management and incident response. Crean said the company is actively hiring, having added eight new people so far this year.

Crean said something he is most proud of in terms of the company’s achievements is maintaining the culture.

“We’ve kept our corporate culture that, unsolicited, our partners will tell you that we’re just real people, from me all the way down to the person who just got hired,” Crean told CRN. “And I love the fact that we’ve been able to maintain that. And all of my employees are really vested in being nice. I think there’s some niceness that the world could use today. And we’ve tried to deliver it.”

What would you say is the fastest-growing part of your business?

Probably the MDR for endpoint. This might be something different that you hear from other people is that most people just call MDR ‘MDR.’ And because there’s this kind of unspoken idea that MDR is meant for just the endpoint, and the endpoint being defined as a Windows, Mac or Linux-based operating system. I don’t believe that to be true, I think endpoint can be looked at as something that you do in [Microsoft Office] 365 or G Suite, because there’s a whole lot of your stuff sitting out there. And if we look at it like an endpoint, then it is, and then you also think about it differently. And you secure it differently, and you put more attention to it. And we’ve already got a history of doing this. If I break it down, yes, our MDR for endpoint is absolutely our fastest-growing, but our MDR for cloud is right behind it.

What would you say are some of the biggest challenges your customers face today?

Understanding that they’re a target, getting the education around that, and making purposeful decisions that have larger impacts, and not necessarily just doing it the old way just because. A lot of it is around education; the threat landscape is changing so fast. And things are moving so quickly right now that doing it the ways of old just isn’t smart anymore. And I also believe that some of that has come from what has happened to us over the last two years with the pandemic. It’s really moved us ahead, in my opinion, probably three to five years in the work-from-home initiative where a lot of businesses that were forced to do it are now finding that they were successful doing it, and they’re going to keep on doing it. And that really changes the dynamics of how and what you’re going to secure.

How would you say that you’re helping your customers with those challenges?

Trying to stay nimble, trying to stay ahead of the curve. And focusing on not doing things the way they were always done, learning from the past that can guide us to the future and really trying to embrace the cloud more. You look at what Microsoft has done and how they’ve enabled the new modern office. Lots of people don’t have the infrastructure that they had just two years ago, people are getting rid of their file servers, they’re working from home, they’re reliant onTeams for that collaboration. The vast majority of people are using 365, or G Suite for their hosted mail now. And that allows you to connect from multiple devices and having that type of nimble behavior to protect it. But also, more importantly, giving our partners the ability to do all of this in a consumption-based model so that they don’t have any annual contracts. They’re not buying things just to sit them on the shelf because they might need them next month when they bring on a new client. They get to install it when they need it. And the billing starts from that point.

In terms of vendors, which vendors do you work most closely with?

We are the largest BlackBerry Cylance MSSP in the world. We work very closely with them. It is a cornerstone of our MDR for endpoint, along with another technology that comes from a company by the name of Infocyte that was recently acquired by Datto. So we became a Datto partner kind of overnight in the last month or two. So those two things are hugely important to us as far as success. We look at our MDR for cloud, we’re using and working with Avanan, which was acquired by Check Point for that API, email security-type technology. Also working with a newer company for some of the log aggregation and monitoring by a company named SaaS Alerts. And then really the backbone to our organization, XDR platform or that SIEM , that log aggregation tool, a company by the name of Stellar Cyber is, it’s where we live and die in our Security Operations Center. And then we’ve got a Firewall as a Service program, where we have many very long, loyal SonicWall partners that will ingest logs from just about everything. But if somebody wants that firewall managed, they want the hardware, they want the software, they want everything that comes with it, that comes from SonicWall for us.