Exploring Assured's Partnership with CDW

The partnership between Assured Data Protection and CDW combines Assured’s expertise in data resiliency with CDW’s extensive customer base to deliver exceptional managed data protection solutions.

This collaboration enhances data security and disaster recovery services, addressing the evolving threats of ransomware and other cyber risks. By leveraging their combined strengths, Assured and CDW provide comprehensive, robust solutions that set new standards in data protection for businesses of all sizes.

Here’s a Q&A with Brock Lambert, Manager, Managed Partner Services at CDW.

What’s your name and title?

Brock Lambert, Manager, Managed Partner Services, CDW

Tell us about your role

I focus squarely on managed services, so I’m responsible for all of our partner managed services, which includes working with OEMs, subcontractors, referral agencies or anything that involves a partner in managed services. It’s a global role and I work for Tom DeCoster and a team of five to expand our managed services offer, which is growing rapidly.

There’s been a major shift towards managed services in recent years. That’s because increasingly, customers want to buy an outcome and there’s a growing understanding that the best way to achieve that is through a managed service, rather than purchasing the tech and having to work everything out for yourself.

I started my tech career working in a niche SaaS market, then moved to an MSP where I gained extensive experience, before joining CDW in March 2020, where I was introduced to our managed Rubrik offer, providing market-leading data backup disaster recovery technology as a managed service.

How long have you been working with Assured?

Since May 2020. Soon after joining CDW, I became an CSM, overseeing our relationship with Middleby Corporation, a global food service equipment industry leader. I’m still involved with that account today.

How do you sell Assured’s services to customers?

To start with, there’s widespread acceptance of the threat posed by ransomware, malware and malicious actors but when it comes to negating those threats, Rubrik stands out in the market. It’s the only immutability solution that’s built from the ground up and driven by APIs. With competing solutions, immutability is always an afterthought.

Assured’s Rubrik managed service offering is robust and flexible, so it can be customized to meet the needs of individual enterprises, and CDW is proud to offer its customers. In fact, I’d describe this as lightning in a bottle. It means we can offer extremely reliable data protection with great resiliency and native immutability, delivered OpEx with an as service consumption model for any company.

Are you seeing increased demand for Rubrik?

We’re seeing very strong customer demand for Rubrik as a managed service and in my view, having been in tech for a long time, this is very likely to continue.

There’s always been demand for disaster recovery solutions but from an MSP standpoint, this has often been a difficult sell, the technology was challenging to implement and didn’t live up to expectations. This all changed when we started working with Assured. We had our first recovery drill up and running within eight hours. What Assured does is put the easy button on a really hard problem. Assured’s ability to offer second site replication with true immutability, facilitating very rapid recovery is in essence future proofing against ransomware.

What type of customers are you selling to?

The range and size of businesses that are interested in Rubrik as a managed service is very broad. It’s universal and encompasses everyone from large international companies right through to family operated small businesses, across all vertical markets. What they all have in common is an absolute need to protect their data and really, that should be a requirement for all businesses.

With Rubrik as a managed service, we’re able to offer even small and medium size businesses an enterprise grade solution at a price point that won’t break the bank. That’s proving very popular. As a company, CDW is well equipped to work across all sectors, including retail, healthcare, finance, and many others. We offer 250K solutions to an equal number of customers. However, when it comes to managed services and Rubrik, we have one solution that we market jointly with Assured. This gives us an added advantage in selling Rubrik.

What type of opportunities do you see in the market at present?

Given CDW’s heritage as a company that grew up selling to Fortune 250 customers, we’ve adopted a cautious approach to selling managed services. Having said that, managed services is a growing muscle for CDW. The way we approach partnering in managed services is through strategic agreements with a few select, highly capable partners, so that we can subcontract the relationship, knowing that it will be beneficial for all parties. That’s the case with our strategic partnership with Assured.

What makes CDW and Assured a good match?

It’s everything that Assured brings to the table, including technical depth, capability, knowledge and understanding, ability to put the customer first, plus all of the technical requirements related to compliance and security tools. I’ll quote my boss who’s the global head of managed services, who says “Assured is a model partner”.

How do you see the market evolving over the next five years?

In my view, we’ve only just cracked open the need for businesses to address the data security problem. How often is it that we hear that data is gold? That’s because of what businesses can do with it and this is only going to become a bigger issue in the age of AI and ML.

Data is now at the heart of business and that means how you protect that data becomes the second most important part of the business. With this in mind, I think we’re just starting to see the book open on data protection, and we’re right there as an easy button answer for the rest of the market when they open that book.