It has been 27 years since I joined my first cybersecurity company, Netegrity. Today, a small team of industry veterans including Ed Jackowiak (whom I first worked with at Netegrity) and I have a unique opportunity to launch a cybersecurity company with seed capital from our own pockets. I use the term “unique” because we have advantages that a startup team (and I have done 6 start-ups) rarely gets to enjoy.
For example:
- We have 60 plus paying customers willing to tell the world how much they love us and our product.
- We have a global set of distributors, resellers, and MDRs who see the market opportunity and that are on board and ready to take us to market.
- We operate in markets Gartner shows to be moving into the “slope of enlightenment” and up the slope to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” in the hype cycle. My experience shows that these are the two best times to be selling a product into those markets.
- We have award-winning artificial intelligence in our platform that was designed in the DARPA Research Labs and refined by a world-class team of data scientists.
But most importantly, we have this unique opportunity to bring a new company to market that is employee-owned. This is pretty rare in the cybersecurity industry. Yes, there are quite a few employee-owned MSP, MSSP, consulting, and reseller companies, but as far as software vendors, over the last ten years, you can count them all on one hand.
Much of the credit for this opportunity comes from our recent parent company, Nominet. As Nominet went through a series of leadership and strategic focus changes, they decided to divest their acquired security divisions to refocus on their core offerings. Nominet worked with the executive team to make our management buyout a reality, and we cannot thank them enough for their support in the process.
So with Nominet’s support, clean financials, money in the bank, revenue coming in, and a robust roadmap to expand our AI-based cyber defense platform from network and cloud to the edge and the endpoint, we start this exciting journey.
So what does being employee-owned mean for our customers and partners?
In one word, Focus – focus on what is important to our customers and what will make our partners successful, and that focus is on the resource-constrained cyber defense and IT teams at medium and small organizations as well as the partners who serve them.
These organizations do not have the people and resources to operate complex SIEM or XDR tools or expensive security operations centers. Therefore, our focus is on delivering intelligent, automated, correlated cyber threat detection and response tools that are affordable and simple.
Let’s deconstruct that sentence to explain what I mean:
Intelligent – Anyone in cybersecurity has lived the challenges of event fatigue and false positives, and for a small team, those challenges are simply overwhelming. The foundation of our platform is a world-class AI detection, correlation, and automation engine. The output is a very low (I am talking 3 or 4 alerts a day) number of highly risky connected events prioritized by just how dangerous they are to your organization.
Automated – With the integration of threat intelligence, policy-based controls, and integrated response actions, the platform is its own security analyst and threat hunter, compliance specialist, and incident responder all wrapped up in one. For a small team, CyGlass NDaaS does the heavy lifting.
Correlated – It seems that XDR is the buzzword of the day; I gave up counting at RSA when I passed 50 booth signs with XDR in the headline. You do not need a new three-letter acronym to know that connecting the dots of risky events from the cloud, network, and endpoint sources is the absolute best way to determine when the initial stages of a cyber attack is underway and stop it. CyGlass already covers the network and cloud, and for those who read this blog, yes, endpoint is coming very soon.
Affordable and simple to operate – There are SIEMs, there are Next Gen SIEMs, there is XDR, and there is open XDR. Together, those tools are offered by well over 50 different vendors, with almost all having one thing in common – they sell to the large enterprise. That makes for a tool that fits in a SOC, feature-rich for all those analysts but also expensive, and complex. Great for a large enterprise. The CyGlass platform focuses on being the easy button. It rolls out in about 30 minutes, can be operated by less than half an FTE or by your partner, and as a SaaS with no hardware to deploy, while our starting price, on average, is 60% less than the enterprise-focused vendors.
As an employee-owned company, that is where our focus will remain – making highly valuable cybersecurity solutions to protect the small and medium enterprise, and we are excited to launch and grow the next generation of CyGlass.
Read our Press Release
Bill Munroe
VP Marketing, CyGlass
