Stay Competitive with Minimum Cost – Upgrade Your Offer with Licensed Technology

If the countless cyber attacks from the past months have made anything clear, it’s that threat actors move fast. Extremely fast. Worse yet, even if their targets and goals differ, cyber criminals collaborate. Much like the security world, which pools resources to highlight new threats, the cyber crime world connives to makes those threats more elusive.

Earlier this year, a highly resilient piece of malware received an update that makes it even harder to detect. Trickbot, a trojan that can steal financial data and act as a botnet, can now run from memory and leave no artefacts behind. It’s also better at encryption and virtual environment detection, it has cyber espionage capabilities, and it can target Linux machines. The worst part? This piece of malware has been around since 2016.

So, how does a piece of malware receive regular updates four years after launch? It’s simple. Trickbot was designed to be modular, a testing ground for people with malicious intent and the technical ability to put it into practice. It’s a piece of malware that has received more updates than legitimate software does. And this is a huge issue.

A shortcut to better protection

Unfortunately, organizations tasked with securing user content don’t always have the time or resources to deal with cyber criminals’ endless creativity. Especially if their core competencies lie in a different market segment, or a different market altogether.

Many such organizations tend to overlook aspects of certain security or to consider them collateral. They often use outdated platforms, open-source alternatives, or a combination of readily available, less professional technologies.

While this compromise is common in the business world, those who use it face a double threat: cyber attackers and a nimbler competition. After all, your competition would rather leverage your weaknesses than compete with your strong points.

As a counter, you can invest in boosting your capabilities, create new modules, or even outsource their implementation. However, the most effective solution remains licensing your security technology from an established provider.

Not only is this a welcome shortcut to augmenting existing capabilities (by providing better detection for advanced threats, for example), but it is also an incredible business asset. Licensed technology can help you create additional revenue streams by exploring new markets. Furthermore, depending on your business strategy, it can accelerate time to market for existing products.

Whether you directly integrate it through an SDK (software development kit), use a white label, or bundle it with other products (hardware or software), a licensed technology will become a part of your offer in a matter of weeks, not months. In the meantime, you continue to concentrate on your core business.

Here are just a few of the advantages of using licensed technology for your next upgrade:

You save resources and infrastructure

A lot of companies that choose ‘’the hard way’’ of consolidating their offer overestimate their available resources. It’s not just time, money and effort that go into building a capable security product. For example, if your company is established on the firewall market, you may be tempted to think that developing antimalware capabilities won’t be that difficult. You already have the server space and a scan engine, right?

Well, aside from the extensive testing, you also have to account for constant updates, of both the malware definitions and the product itself. This is no easy task, especially when malware gets updated just as often. As the complexity of your module grows, so does the amount of resources needed. If you choose licensing, infrastructure upgrades will never be an issue!

You save marketing and sales time

Adding a technology or module to your offer doesn’t just give you a full package of technical benefits -- it also comes with pre-made customer segmentation and existing use cases. This can prove vital when trying to diversify your portfolio or even tackle new markets.

In other words, instead of performing expensive research and cold-lead campaigns, your teams can simply focus on what works. Why bother with focus groups when you know precisely who your target is? Selling an IoT device with improved security, for example, is easier when you know what threats your users fear the most.

You mitigate business risks

When comparing the costs of acquiring licensed technology to in-house updates, many companies make an erroneous assumption. They believe the upgrade would actually work and be successful. But what if it doesn’t? What if it is incompatible with your clients’ systems or if customers don’t accept it? That would not only impact your reputation on the segment you were leading, but would also impact employee morale. Not to mention the financial loss.

Of course, the risk of a product failing to meet expectations is one you can anticipate. However, there are other risks, like compliance with local regulation that you might not be prepared for. If your technology is licensed, you can use the reputation of your licensor in your target market to sell there.

You gain a competitive edge

The technology you acquire from a licensor will always be updated, patched and maintained by its provider. Furthermore, it will benefit from expertise and prestige. In other words, it will always stay competitive. This will allow you to focus on your core business and maintain or even increase your market share.

The truth is that using licensed technology from an established provider is a risk-free and reasonably priced alternative to developing your own. So, why not expand your product suite and increase your revenue stream?

Start with the best

Present in over 38% of the world’s security solutions and with over 150 technology partners, Bitdefender is the provider of choice when it comes to security technology licensing. Not only does our company have the world’s largest security-delivery infrastructure, but we have consistently outranked our competition in independent tests.

Our SDKs are usable out-of-the-box with no complex installations and our team is there to guide you every step of the way. Oh, and did we mention we offer flexible licensing options, fully tailored to your business models?

If you want to find out more about our offer, contact our consultants now!