CollaboraSec, enterprise-grade protection for SMEs built for the channel by Collabora and Cisco

For a long time the assumption held that a small business had only small security problems. That idea is now simply detached from reality. Ransomware, identity theft, phishing supercharged by artificial intelligence: the arsenal of threats is the same for everyone, from the large industrial group to the firm with five employees. Only one variable changes: the ability to respond quickly.

Gianluca Pareschi, Partner Account Manager at Cisco, puts it plainly: “large companies have in-house SOCs, dedicated teams and mature processes, while the real danger for many SMEs is not the availability of tools, but the lack of qualified support to run them day after day and to react quickly when an incident hits“. The result is an asymmetry measured in time: the gap between a breach and its discovery, the weeks that Clusit data put on the Italian SME average, the 80% of European incidents that ENISA traces back to vulnerabilities that were already known, flaws that steady monitoring could have closed with ease. He goes on: “companies often run different technologies scattered across endpoint, network, cloud, collaboration and identity, but there is no single pane of glass. That stretches detection times and makes it genuinely hard to tell a routine alert from a critical incident.

Generative and agentic AI is widening the attack surface enormously: applications that talk to each other on their own, data flows nobody governs, API access, SaaS tools used off the radar. Many companies today have no clear view of where their sensitive data travels or who touches it.

At the same time, rules like NIS2 are turning cybersecurity from a technology choice into an operational and supply-chain responsibility. Even small and mid-sized players now sit, directly or indirectly, inside the perimeter of these obligations”.

Emanuele Spini, New Route To Market Lead, Partner Sales at Cisco, brings it back to one word: visibility. “Plenty of organisations don’t realise they’ve been breached until long after the damage is done, because the mounting complexity of networks and legacy infrastructure makes complete, timely visibility hard to come by”; and he attaches a number to the point, because a network’s blind spots can account for anywhere from 20 to 40% of infrastructure that is unmanaged or unknown, with breaches surfacing on average a hundred to two hundred days later. You can’t defend what you can’t see. “Put simply, the central challenge today is real, complete visibility into the network, the kind that lets you catch attacks in real time and respond effectively, cutting down risk and potential damage”

Federico Grassi, co-founder of Collabora, says that “From where we sit, we see cyber threats evolving at a furious pace, and not just in numbers; the bigger shift is in quality. Attacks are more sophisticated, more automated and harder to catch, partly because AI is now used to make phishing, social engineering and the compromise of digital identities far more convincing and far more effective.

Many companies, SMEs above all, are facing an ever wider exposure surface without any real sense of the risks sitting inside their own digital infrastructure

This is exactly where the channel closes the gap: we help organisations move from a reactive stance, built around cleaning up the damage, to a proactive model of prevention, continuous monitoring and rapid response, catching threats before they harden into incidents that hurt the business.

What CollaboraSec is, and who it’s for

Before saying what it does, it helps to say who it’s aimed at: CollaboraSec is a channel tool for SMEs. It is a managed cybersecurity service built on Cisco XDR technology, designed so that system integrators and resellers can offer their clients enterprise-grade protection without standing up a full SOC of their own. Understanding a company’s business logic is one of the cornerstones of complete security, and you can’t get there without it; that is why the partner is always a core part of any protection service.

Lucia Cioni, Network Manager at Collabora, describes it as an ecosystem rather than a single product: a chain that begins with Strategic Security Advisory, runs through Advanced Security Services such as vulnerability assessment, penetration testing and OSINT work, carries on into the Enablement and Deployment phase of demos, proofs of concept and hands-on training, and reaches the heart of the offering, the Managed Services. What this technology rests on is not reaction but prevention: “it lets you monitor cyber threats in real time, spotting anomalous behaviour and intrusion attempts before they can turn into critical, unrecoverable incidents”. Pareschi sums it up: “the goal is to make cybersecurity accessible, sustainable and manageable even for companies with no dedicated team in-house”.

Collabora, twenty years of competence center before the SEC suffix

To understand CollaboraSec you have to step back to “Collabora” itself, the Cisco competence center inside the distribution channel ecosystem, born twenty years ago from an initiative by Computer Nessos and Cisco Italia as a business enabler for partners on Cisco’s newer, more complex technologies; a place the channel has always turned to for consulting, design and specialist support. Cioni frames it as a continuation: “with CollaboraSec we’re applying that same model of collaboration, expertise and ongoing support to the world of cyber security today”. Pareschi calls Collabora an “enablement platform for partners; in Federico Grassi’s words: “CollaboraSec is a rare blend, of Cisco’s technology leadership, the distributor’s experience and the scalability of vendor support, with a fully certified team at the channel’s disposal, the whole thing coordinated along the line that runs from vendor to distributor to partner to end user”. It is not just a technology service. It is an operating model that pulls together platform, monitoring, event correlation, specialist consulting and continuous support.

Under the hood: Cisco XDR

The engine is the Cisco Security ecosystem, and the capabilities of Cisco XDR in particular. The platform draws signals from domains that normally never speak to one another, endpoint, network, identity, email, cloud environments and third-party tools, and correlates them automatically into a single view of incidents. The payoff isn’t only seeing more; it is seeing less of what doesn’t matter. Pareschi calls it “cutting the operational noise right down”, telling an everyday alert apart from the incident that actually counts, which is the daily grind for anyone watching over a network.

Spini adds the methodological side, the discipline Cisco honed in large SOCs and is now scaling down: “continuous, in-depth visibility, behavioural monitoring and network segmentation, so you can flag anomalous activity early and box in an attacker’s lateral movement”. Cioni is clear that the Cisco XDR foundation is not the finish line, because on top of it CollaboraSec layers specialist skills and further solutions to build a security ecosystem shaped around the real customer, not the textbook one.

The chain you can see: the Cisco Powered Services certification

Here is something the end customer actually feels the value of: Collabora is a Cisco certified Partner through the Cisco Powered Services programme, a certification that, as Spini explains, “vouches for the ability to build, deliver, manage and support managed services based on Cisco technologies”. It is no decorative stamp; it is a guarantee of process and delivery across the whole chain, which translates into “guaranteed results, recognised quality, security and reliability grounded in rigorous standards”, with a flexible consumption model on top. For the small business it comes down to one thing: behind its trusted reseller stands a structure that has been certified and checked.

The real differentiator isn’t the technology, it’s the consulting

The market is full of managed security services, some of them a few clicks away online; the fair question is why pick one built by the channel. The answer lies in something technology alone can’t deliver. Pareschi pins it down: “behind this managed service it isn’t only analysts, there’s an extra layer made of consultants”. CollaboraSec doesn’t stop at raising alarms; it helps the partner and the customer read the risk, put it in context and decide what to do about it.

It is that shift from pure technical delivery to ongoing consulting that creates value, and it is what lets the channel pick up on emerging needs and grow alongside its customers on security and advanced technology. “Starting from this technology base and building on our specialist skills, we can fold in further Cisco solutions to create an even more advanced, resilient security ecosystem, tailored precisely to how the customer actually operates”, explains Federico Grassi, who points to the twenty-year relationship with Cisco and with Italian resellers as the bedrock of all of it, shared experience that delivers “a level of quality, reliability and integration well above many of the standalone solutions on the market today”.

For the reseller, that means real empowerment: faster activation, easier adoption, a broader protected surface, NIS2 compliance and a relationship of trust renewed with the customer. For the customer, mid-sized or small, the experience is one of monitoring that never lets up, visibility over weak spots it had never mapped, a certified chain, a senior consultant at its side and the demand on its own time kept to a minimum. The channel stays central throughout; the partner is the one who knows the company’s processes and priorities, and it is that store of trust that makes a remotely delivered service genuinely effective.

Agentic AI

There is a sense of urgency that runs deeper than the current state of security, and it has to do with a perimeter shifting fast under the weight of AI. Emanuele Spini frames it like this: “if you can’t see what’s happening in the environment, you can’t know whether you’re under attack”. Pareschi explains why the problem is changing in kind: “today it isn’t just users logging into systems, it’s software agents reading data, talking between applications, kicking off workflows and making operational decisions”; new blind spots, new exposure surfaces, flows multiplying at speed that the company often hasn’t the faintest sense of.

The point isn’t to stop innovation, it’s to govern it. Lucia Cioni unpacks the idea CollaboraSec is built around: observability, reworked to catch behaviour that no longer comes from traditional users or systems, but from automations and intelligent agents operating inside the corporate ecosystem. This is security that has to turn adaptive, able to watch not only people but the interactions between machines, agents and data; and it is precisely the ground on which the ability to unify events from different sources becomes a condition for any real defence.

From security as a cost to security as continuity

What lingers is the perception, still the tallest hurdle for many SMEs, of cybersecurity as a cost to push back or a complexity too awkward to handle. With CollaboraSec the partner brings SMEs a security model that is mature, continuous and within reach, one that can turn security from a perceived cost into a concrete lever for operational continuity and digital trust; companies get to lift the weight of cost, threats and technology doubts off their shoulders, free to get back to their core business, backed by the partner they trust and by a service built to enterprise standard.

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