In this eChannelNews conversation, Paolo Del Nibletto, Editor at eChannelNews, speaks with Mac Grant, VP America Sales and Channels at ColorTokens, about how ColorTokens enterprise microsegmentation platform helps organizations strengthen breach readiness in the age of AI-driven attacks.
Mac explains how ColorTokens is helping teams move faster from visibility to enforcement with a flexible, hybrid architecture built for modern enterprise environments. The platform supports agentless coverage for roughly 70% of an organization’s footprint, while using lightweight agents where specialized visibility is required.
At the center of the discussion is Xshield AI Agent, an AI-driven automation engine designed to discover assets, recommend microsegmentation policies, and simulate their impact before enforcement. This helps security teams rapidly reduce lateral movement risk without disrupting critical applications.
Mac also shares customer evidence that shows the value of proactive containment. In one healthcare penetration test, a critical Epic environment became entirely invisible to attackers. ColorTokens customers have also achieved a 90% improvement in breach-readiness scores within just 90 days of deployment.
As attackers increasingly use AI to move faster and with greater precision, the conversation highlights why organizations need to shift from reactive response to proactive, automated containment. Mac also discusses ColorTokens’ 100% channel-first strategy and how the company is scaling through resellers, managed service providers, and implementation partners.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to e-Channel News. I’m your host, Paolo Dall’Oglio. In today’s episode, it’s on how hackers are using AI to weaponize the attack surface. Uh, with traditional security controls struggling to keep pace nowadays, uh, how is microsegmentation and how is that gonna automate policy definition and deployment, and will it help you reduce, uh, those cycles?
Paolo Del Nibletto: Here to talk about this and more is, uh, Mac Grant, the vice president of America Sales and Channels at ColorTokens. Mac, welcome to the program.
Mac Grant: Hey, Paolo. Nice to meet you. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Paolo Del Nibletto: We’re excited to have you, for sure. So, um- ColorTokens is a Silicon Valley provider of enterprise microsegmentation solutions that, uh, operationalize breach readiness across hybrid cloud environments.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Uh, you’ve just released, uh, a new solution called X Shield AI Agent. It’s, uh, AI driven… Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this. Uh- … AI driven policy automation engine designed to eliminate the complexity of microsegmentation deployment. I wanna ask you, Mac, how complex is it? How would you describe that, and why has it always been so operationally complex?
Mac Grant: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really good question. And, uh, and that’s it, microsegmentation is not a new concept. I, I like to refer to our platform as a next generation microsegmentation platform for that very reason. We, we take a lot of the complexity out. And there are a couple of big things that have held microsegmentation back in terms of adoption, in terms of deployment, and ultimately just in terms of delivering value to customers.
Mac Grant: Uh, the first one, uh, is not necessarily related to AI, but, but is, is, uh, is a big problem, and that is just getting the technology out there. So a lot of the, uh, a lot of the legacy, if you wanna call it, microsegmentation solutions, the solutions that have been around for a while, have absolutely required that you deploy an agent to every server, every workstation, every, you know, cloud workload, container, all of those things, in order to get the visibility and control that you need.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Right.
Mac Grant: So there are… We, we can get into the details on how we do this, but we have the flexibility of using an agent where you want to, but also in particular circumstances which represent probably 70% of the organizations out there, we don’t actually have to deploy an agent. So that gets the technology out there super fast.
Mac Grant: Um, the other is related to AI, and, and that is, uh, policy creation. So there are a couple of different ways that we create policies a lot more quickly, uh, than, than was previously possible. Uh, one of those ways, using our AI agent that you just described- Mm-hmm … you can simply ask it the question, you know, say you’re a healthcare provider, and we have a lot of hospitals as customers.
Mac Grant: You can say, “Hey, you know, can you recommend a policy to protect my Epic environment?” And of course, this is a system that is pervasive in the environment, so it knows my Epic environment specifically, and it can recommend a policy. So now instead of creating the policy from scratch, the end users can essentially ask for a policy, and then they can, um, they can assess the policy.
Mac Grant: They can evaluate the policy before putting it into enforcement mode. So that’s the big, that’s the big thing we’re using AI for. Um, and there are other ways, other techniques that we can use to kind of m- m- you know, we know what attackers are using to move laterally, um, you know, what ports and protocols, and we can very quickly put in place, uh, policies that limit the use of those technologies across the entire environment, um, you know, very, very quickly without any risk to, uh, you know, the real applications that, uh, the organization’s running.
Mac Grant: Does that make sense?
Paolo Del Nibletto: Yeah. Uh, so let, let’s talk about the marketplace for a second. Um, why come out with this kind of release? Why now? What’s happening in the marketplace where, you know, ColorTokens felt compelled to come out with this product?
Mac Grant: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, because there are a couple of different things that are going on.
Mac Grant: Number one, micro-segmentation is starting to grow at a very rapid rate, and that’s good news- Okay … for our channel partners, by the way, because there is- Right … a nice service lift and there’s a lot of good evi- you know, there’s strong evidence that we can deliver, uh, the outcomes that we want to deliver.
Mac Grant: Uh, but the other reason for why now is, you know, AI is something we need to defend aga- against. You look at w- what we learned from the Mythos news over the past- Right. Yeah … eight weeks and months. Yeah. Uh, you know, those attackers can now move at such speed and with such previ- precision that, you know, the concept of, “Hey, let’s respond quickly to this attack”, forget about it.
Mac Grant: Responding is too late. Yeah. With micro… With what we do, we can put the microsegmentation policy in place so that when an attacker lands in the environment, they just can’t move laterally. We have one customer- Yeah … that, uh, that, an- another healthcare customer that, that their quote when they ran a penetration test and the penetration tester couldn’t even find their Epic environment, his com- they, his comment was, “This is fantastic.
Mac Grant: It’s like Epic was a ghost.” So, you know- Wow … the attacker can’t even see what’s going on in the n- environment, can’t find anything. That’s what we want, and that’s when they go… That’s when they are forced to kinda go and find another victim, I guess, if you will. So we need- Yeah … something to kinda be able to put it in p- place proactively-
Paolo Del Nibletto: Right
Mac Grant: as opposed to wait for the attack to happen and then respond quickly, because it’s too late at that point.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Okay. So I’ll be w- uh, walk me through this a- again. Uh, let’s say you and I, we worked at, uh, in a side of SOC or a, a GIRC. Um, so now I guess- I can, I can assess the exposure, uh, implement some countermeasures, and, uh, whereas before, that took way too long.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Is that, is that oversimplifying it, or, or what do you say to that?
Mac Grant: Yeah, I mean, you can design the countermeasures in the… You know, while you’re in the calm before the storm. So, you know, like most organiza- Yeah You gotta, with the number of vectors, number of ways an attacker can get into an organization, you gotta consider it as an inevitability that you’re gonna be breached.
Mac Grant: And the whole concept- Yeah … of breach readiness is exactly what you just said. It’s let’s put the work in now while the waters are calm so that when we are attacked, the defenses are there. We’ve already got not just a strategy, but we’ve literally got the playbooks created around how we are going to- Okay
Mac Grant: contain the attack, how we are going to protect the critical assets, and how we’re gonna stop that attacker from moving laterally and creating any substantial damage. Um, I have a good friend, a CISO, that implemented microsegmentation. Um, and it turned out, he, you know, he didn’t know it was happening at the time that it happened, but-
Paolo Del Nibletto: Okay
Mac Grant: he was attacked on the same day by the same crew and with the same technologies from the same IP addresses as one of those big, you know, big name attacks that we read about in the, you know, in the news.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Right.
Mac Grant: And, uh, and his reality was nothing happened. You know, he had a couple- Well- … of machines to work on, clean up.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Well, that, that’s what you want, right? Uh, you want everyone working, uh, what they do with their daily lives, have all that stuff happen in the background, right?
Mac Grant: Yeah, yeah, because the attacker tried to move. Right. They tried, they realized they weren’t gonna be able to get anywhere. Maybe they were attacking 10 different companies on the same day.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Probably.
Mac Grant: And, uh, and, um, and ultimately, you know-
Paolo Del Nibletto: He just moved on to an easier target.
Mac Grant: Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Yeah. Uh, y- uh, Matt, you mentioned channel earlier. Uh, what is the channel strategy?
Mac Grant: Oh, our ch- well, we are a 100% channel organization, you know, by design, by choice. Uh, you know, we believe as a, as a, as a service provider, there is no way we can scale to solve the problems of all of our customers if we’re just doing all the work and creating all the opportunities ourselves.
Mac Grant: So we have a fully built out, uh, enablement plan that starts with, you know, helping channel partners to learn how to sell our technology, both from a sales and a technical perspective, but also how to do the implementations, how to support them long term. So depending on what type of a channel partner you’re, you are, um, if you wanna be- ultimately provide a managed service around our technology, we can get you there.
Mac Grant: If you wanna just s- sell it and sell the support for it and have us deliver that support, we can do that. If you wanna do the initial implementation but the customer co- you know, lots of different models.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Mm-hmm.
Mac Grant: But, um, at the end of the day, we have a channel organization, um, that has technical as well as, um, as, uh, you know, kinda channel account management assets, as well as our customer success organization that engages with our channel partners to ensure we’ve got a good plan for each one of their customers.
Paolo Del Nibletto: So if I was a channel partner, uh, like how would you describe the marketplace for your solutions? What’s the opportunity there for someone like, like me, like an MSP or, or a solution provider, like a full service solution provider or something like that, um, with, with ColorTokens, um, uh, h- how big is this marketplace?
Mac Grant: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you say that. It’s growing, in my opinion, it’s growing to the to- to, to become eventually the size of the total addressable market of the data center and cloud firewall market. Really? That’s, that’s, that’s my personal opinion.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Okay.
Mac Grant: Um, and there is some evidence of that. If you look at the, you know, we all know the Gartner hype cycle.
Mac Grant: You know, they come out with that for different technologies.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Absolutely. And, you know- I’ve encountered that many times.
Mac Grant: Yeah. Yeah. So this market has been through the- Yeah … peak of inflated expectations and the trough of disillusionment- Right … and it has ridden up that, that slope of enlightenment, and we’re right at the beginning of that, what is it called?
Mac Grant: The plateau of productivity.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Okay.
Mac Grant: The reason that’s good for channel partners is the difficult part of building the technology is it’s why this kinda ColorTokens as a next generation platform is really powerful. The hard work has been done. The days of, you know, this is a slog, this is a hard implementation-
Paolo Del Nibletto: Right
Mac Grant: this is, this is something that, um, you know- As a channel partner, your, everyth- your relationship with your customer is gold, right? You don’t wanna introduce a technology that is risky, that is gonna be hard to implement, that’s gonna be a black eye for you. You wanna introduce a technology that is gonna make you look like a hero to the customer- Yes
Mac Grant: because it’s gonna come in, it’s gonna, you know, it’s gonna be managed like silk, and, and it’s gonna deliver powerful outcomes. So that’s where we are with the market now. We can actually deliver really strong outcomes very quickly. We have customers that have dropped their risk of lateral movement, we call it kind of a, a breach readiness index, uh, by 90% in-
Paolo Del Nibletto: Yeah, I read that
Paolo Del Nibletto: three months.
Mac Grant: Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s not baloney and a- in, in reality
Paolo Del Nibletto: Yeah …
Mac Grant: we can do it faster than that, and we have- Yeah … done it faster than that. The reason we say three months or 90 days is because- Mm-hmm … if we, if we shared the actual statistics around what customers have been able to deliver, you know, folks probably wouldn’t believe us.
Mac Grant: Uh, but when the customer wants to move fast, we can move in, in a matter of days, quite frankly.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Uh, w- what’s your, uh, channel coverage, uh, look like, uh, if I took out the North American map? Uh, uh, like, are, are you covered throughout, or do you have any gaps? Is there any areas where you wanna focus on in terms of building?
Mac Grant: Oh, that’s a great question. We have a really, uh, unique philosophy. I don’t know that it’s… I think, I think it’s powerful. Mm-hmm. Whether it’s unique or not, you can tell me. But, um, we believe every one of our sellers is a channel account manager. So they all carry a responsibility for engaging locally with all of their partners.
Mac Grant: They all are kind of involved in this k- in this, uh, uh, opportunity development, in this, in this enablement, uh, and coordination of all those things. And then we have an organization, a channel organization that overlays that across North America. Um, and, and those are the folks that kind of build the programs and, uh, and, uh, kind of en- engage at a, uh, at a, a leadership level, if you will-
Paolo Del Nibletto: Okay
Mac Grant: with the channel partners. And, and I’m very actively involved in all of that as well.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Fantastic. Uh, let’s talk a b- little bit about you. Uh, do you, do you have any likes or dislikes, uh, personally or from a business or maybe even a channel perspective?
Mac Grant: Well, at a personal level, I’m a grandfather. I just became a grandfather last year, and
Mac Grant: that was very exciting. Oh, congratulations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, yeah. And, uh, and last week my, my daughter just, uh, graduated from law school, so we’re, we’re excited about those things. So- Wow … those are the big things at a personal level.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Those are great milestones.
Mac Grant: They are. They are indeed. Um, and from a business perspective, I, uh, you know, I’ve just been really passionate about this concept for a very long time.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Mm-hmm.
Mac Grant: Uh, the first time I was introduced to it, I worked, I was working at, you know, one of those big firewall vendors. I don’t know if I should say the name of the companies. I don’t, you know, I don’t- Well, I
Paolo Del Nibletto: mean, there, there, there’s certainly a few of them. More than a few of them, actually. Yeah.
Mac Grant: Yeah.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Uh, you could probably put a t- a top 10 list and probably get it right.
Mac Grant: Yeah, yeah. And I, I, I just remember the, the first time I saw the concept of microsegmentation- Mm-hmm … happened to be when, you know, we, I had just come from a meeting. I was a sales guy at the time. Mm-hmm. I had just come from a meeting with a customer that had just bought, you know, a bunch of those… Actually, they had bought two years prior, um, big chassis-based firewalls for their data centers, and they were using those for internal data center segmentation.
Mac Grant: And one of their engineers came up to me and he said, “Hey, Mack, you know, I’ve got great news.” I said, “What’s the great news?” He said, “They’re racked and stacked.” Uh, and I said, “What are you talking about?” And, you know, and, and as a seller, I was thinking, “How am I gonna ever sell anything to this organization again?”
Mac Grant: It’s two years in, and they’ve just got these things racked and stacked. How long is it gonna take for them to build policy in? And that was just a, you know, freaky moment for me around, like, how much effort these enterprises have to go through to get physical firewalls deployed and then work on the policy.
Mac Grant: They have to work on the policy literally in the dark. They’re, they’re guessing at what- Yeah … the applications do. No, it’s absolutely true.
Paolo Del Nibletto: The first thing…
Mac Grant: Yeah, the first thing we give customers is that knowledge of how the application is talking. We show it to them visually on a map- Yeah … so they can see it, and they build their policy from that.
Mac Grant: So the fear of putting something in enforcement totally goes away because you’re building your policy based on the reality of how the application is working today. So that
Paolo Del Nibletto: was just- You know, and, and- … a tongue-in-cheek thing for me … you’re absolutely right, Mack. You know, in reality, a- and, and all those vendors there, i, i- in that space, they’re, they’re all terrific, right?
Paolo Del Nibletto: They all have a rock solid solution, something like that. But it really only gets you, uh, 85% of the way there. Right. And that extra last mile, right, that everyone talks about- It, it, it, to your point earlier about complexity There’s so many moving parts that it, it makes it really challenging. But, um-
Mac Grant: Sure does, yeah
Paolo Del Nibletto: I, I wanna thank you for your time today. Where can people, uh, especially in the channel community, find you or find, uh, uh, ColorTokens if they wanted to get in touch with you?
Mac Grant: Well, they can certainly find me on LinkedIn. Mm-hmm. Mac, M-A-C, Grant, G-R-A-N-T, and you know the name of the company. Um, and colortokens.com is our website.
Mac Grant: Uh, you can enter a request for a demonstration. You can enter a request for a partnership on our website. Uh, there are… We do have a fully built out partner portal so that, you know, once you become a partner, you have access to all of our, our, you know, all of our, uh, content and all of that kind of stuff.
Mac Grant: Yeah, just, you know, LinkedIn or our website to get started, and then we’ll, uh, then we’ll engage with your organization and, and build a success plan together.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Fantastic. Well, there you have it from Mac Grant of ColorTokens. Really appreciate your time today. Uh, that’s it for me, Paul Donnelly-Blether, for E-Channel News.
Paolo Del Nibletto: Until next time, so long.
