WatchGuard is a company that specializes in cybersecurity solutions, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), managed service providers (MSPs), and distributed enterprises. Pulse 2.0 interviewed WatchGuard CPO and SVP of Product Management Andrew Young to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Andrew Young’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Young said:
“I joined WatchGuard in 2015 as our SVP of Product Management and Chief Product Officer. I have over 25 years of experience working in various leadership roles throughout my career and am incredibly passionate about helping managed service providers (MSPs) —third-party companies that manage organizations’ cybersecurity needs — succeed.
“I accomplish this by working directly with partners, listening to their needs, formulating product strategies alongside my product management team, and maximizing product value.”
“Prior to WatchGuard, I was Senior Vice President of Identity Protection at Gemalto, where I managed the enterprise, e-banking and trusted identity segments. Prior to that, I spent 11 years with SafeNet in a variety of senior product management roles for IPsec and SSL VPN, high-speed encryption, and identity and authentication. Before that, I managed engineering teams at Rainbow Technologies, a leader in enterprise security products. Each of these roles provided me with unique experiences and skills, all of which I try to apply to my work today at WatchGuard. “
“Currently, I’m responsible for overseeing and spearheading WatchGuard’s product strategy, executing on both organic and M&A platform expansion. I’m responsible for all aspects of WatchGuard’s technology vision including organizational ownership of product managers, product owners, market owners, and user experience.”
“A typical day includes working with our product line leaders, defining strategy, differentiation, and aligning these with company priorities. I am always looking for new technology to bring into the Unified Security Platform (USP) and spend time reviewing new technology areas that could be a fit for our MSP partners. Finally, my team and I are constantly reviewing the business performance of our portfolio and finding opportunities to replicate success across the various components of the USP.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Young reflected:
“My favorite memories at WatchGuard are all related to releasing new products. We have accomplished many ‘firsts’ while building the USP; it’s difficult to pick just one. The most recent would be our launch of FireCloud Internet Access, which enables partners to deploy network security in a truly hybrid manner, supporting both traditional parameters and Cloud-based architectures all within a single consistent platform.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Young explained:
“At WatchGuard, we’re proud to be a global leader in unified cybersecurity. Our products and services are designed for MSPs to deliver world-class security to improve their business scale and efficiency. We’re honored to be trusted by more than 17,000 security resellers and service providers to protect over 250,000 customers who utilize our products, including network security and intelligence, advanced endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication, and AI-driven threat detection and response solutions. WatchGuard helps MSPs provide world-class cybersecurity across critical industries, including education, healthcare, state and local government, and more. WatchGuard ensures partners have better, faster, and stronger detection and response in today’s increasingly challenging threat landscape. All of our services are available on our management portal, WatchGuard Cloud, which provides a ‘single pane of glass’ experience for easy administration, automation, visibility, and reporting.”
“WatchGuard offerings include:
- Comprehensive Network Security: WatchGuard simplifies network security with easy-to-manage firewalls, secure Wi-Fi access points, and advanced security services—all working together to safeguard businesses from malware, ransomware, and evolving online attacks. Whether our customers have a small office or a growing enterprise, we offer a scalable solution that protects their data, devices, and users—letting businesses focus on what matters most. Offerings include:
- FireCloud Internet Access: Our first release in a new family of hybrid secure access service edge (SASE) products, FireCloud Internet Access secures organizations’ technology regardless of location—both on-premises and in the cloud.
- WatchGuard ThreatSync+ NDR: Leverages advanced AI to analyze users’ network traffic, identify suspicious activity, and issue real-time alerts. Network detection and response (NDR) monitors network traffic and recognizes potential threats, allowing for swift action.
- WatchGuard ThreatSync+ SaaS: Provides organizations with AI-driven, affordable, easy-to-operate cloud threat detection and response solutions that help harden cloud environments and protect them from sophisticated cyberattacks. Utilizing advanced AI and machine learning, it effectively detects and responds to evolving threats, continuously learning from cloud user, file, and application events to minimize false positives and enhance accuracy.
- Identity Security: WatchGuard’s AuthPoint Identity Security provides our partners with tools to protect identities, assets, accounts, and information. Our multi-factor authentication (MFA) and credential management services include a corporate password manager and dark web monitoring to safeguard businesses and individuals against workforce credential attacks.
- Endpoint Security: In today’s threat landscape, endpoints (any device with network connectivity) have become a prime target for cybercriminals to gain access to sensitive information and infrastructure. WatchGuard’s Endpoint Security suite prevents bad actors from infiltrating networks through endpoints with tools like antivirus, DNS filtering (which prevents access to malicious websites and domains), and more.
- Platform Capabilities: WatchGuard’s Unified Security Platform includes numerous platform security tools to hunt, identify, and remediate threats throughout partners’ environments and across multiple security tools. Tools include:
- WatchGuard XDR: Provides partners with AI-driven threat detection and response across networks, devices, cloud platforms, and more. Extended detection and response (XDR) oversees threat data from multiple sources in an organization’s tech stack and unifies it in one easy-to-digest place.
- WatchGuard MDR: A 24/7 managed detection and response (MDR) service, WatchGuard MDR utilizes our team of cybersecurity experts who monitor threats and respond to them accordingly, taking the guesswork out of our partners’ cybersecurity needs.”
Release Of FireCloud Internet Access
We’re excited to see the recent release of FireCloud Internet Access. Can you tell me more about the product and how it fits in the market today? Young pointed out:
“FireCloud Internet Access is our first product in a new family of hybrid secure access service edge (SASE) products. FireCloud Internet Access uniquely meets the needs of hybrid organizations that combine traditional on-premises and Cloud/firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) environments by delivering consistency across Fireboxes (our award-winning line of firewall products) and FireCloud with nearly identical configurations and no learning curve.”
“Vendors providing SASE solutions often overlook the importance of integrated on-premises environments, diminishing the value of deploying a SASE solution. As a result, they often end up creating isolated systems that are managed separately, leading to unnecessary complexity and overhead. We created FireCloud Internet Access as the right answer for these hybrid environments, as it integrates with WatchGuard Cloud and shares unified policy management with Firebox, combining FWaaS and secure web gateway (SWG) to deliver robust protection without complexity.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Young acknowledged:
“WatchGuard continually evaluates ways to bring the best capabilities to market as quickly as possible. This evaluation often includes a build vs. buy analysis: should we build the capabilities organically or acquire technology and integrate it into the platform? In parallel to building FireCloud Internet Access, we evaluated several companies for potential acquisition. The fundamental requirements from our MSP community were that hybrid was key, alongside consistent security services and policies. Based on these requirements, we knew that organic was the best approach and therefore abandoned our acquisition activities in this space.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges do your partners face, and how are you helping them solve them? Young explained:
“Businesses are balancing the need for 360-degree protection while avoiding cybersecurity vendor and technology sprawl. This struggle is fueling recent interest in MSPs as an all-inclusive solution to outsource their cybersecurity needs. However, most security solutions do not fit MSPs’ unique needs, resulting in wasted time and resources figuring out how to make it all work. To compound this, MSPs are feeling the pressure and being held to a higher level of accountability as cyber threats continue to advance and have serious potential to undermine the credibility of the companies they affect. To keep up, MSPs are being more critical of who they trust in their product supply chain to ensure they’re working with the right vendors. We see this theme of accountability moving upstream to MSPs and vendors as something positive, as it makes enterprise-grade security more readily available to all organizations.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Young cited:
We recently acquired ActZero, a leading provider of MDR services, to help us expand our own MDR service to meet growing demand. After joining forces with ActZero, we’ve been able to add capacity, scalability, and new technology to expand our MDR service to the full WatchGuard portfolio of products. With the ability to further scale, we can handle a larger partner base efficiently, building confidence with our partners so they can easily add more services as we expand our MDR capabilities. ActZero was the perfect partner for us to do this, as they’ve built their own MDR service with regard to a scalable customer experience.
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific partner success stories? Young highlighted:
“We have plenty to share, but one of my favorites surrounds our work with the Seattle Kraken, Seattle’s NHL team. The Kraken’s IT team is responsible for managing and protecting more than 260 individuals and their devices at home and on the road, as well as servers, private networks, and other equipment. During the 2023-2024 season, the team needed a solution that stopped cyberthreats and protected its critical assets. As a result, they deployed WatchGuard firewalls, endpoint protection, antivirus, advanced threat detection and response across all environments, and device and patch management. After implementing WatchGuard’s cybersecurity suite, they were empowered with the tools to protect the team’s sensitive data and proprietary information.”
“The Kraken didn’t just need to protect their own employees; however, the Kraken Community Iceplex, which houses the team’s offices and IT equipment, has both rinks and a Wi-Fi network that are open to the public. The Kraken’s firewalls see upwards of 1,000 visitors per day, meaning that maintaining its network’s security is critical in making sure its fans are safe.”
“The Kraken team let us know that they’ve been really impressed with how easy it was to migrate to our services. They’ve also really appreciated our XDR solution’s ability to help the team remain up-to-speed on which aspects of their tech stack are more susceptible to threats. Today, we’re really proud to be the official cybersecurity partner of the Seattle Kraken. If you’re in the Seattle area and end up going to a Kraken game, you might see a familiar logo around the arena!”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Young concluded:
“As MSPs are becoming the go-to for organizations to keep their employees and customers safe, we’re excited to continue supplying and building on our line of products to help MSPs remain aligned with their customers’ unique needs and goals while improving our scalability. We’re currently working towards integrating more of our offerings (like WatchGuard EPDR) into ActZero’s platform, releasing more offerings as part of our FireCloud line of FWaaS products, and more.”
“Overall, we’re determined to build on our promise: to take care of our partners every step of the way. At WatchGuard, our goal isn’t to just provide services; we care deeply about our partners’ growth, security, and peace of mind. From proactive support to tailored solutions, our goal is to ensure they’re always protected, empowered, and supported.”
