29.07.2022 Our CEO and Founder Tim Kirk provides his thoughts on the past year, and shares his plans for SureCity Networks’ continued growth in 2022.
Review the last financial year, they said. An easier said than done task, considering the last 12 months have been among our busiest – not that we’re complaining. Continued growth in the team, entering new markets, new services and products that’ll benefit all our customers, registering the business in London and gaining a UK client. It’s been a year built on the foundations of several successful wins and which reflects how hard we work to keep you safe. And all against a backdrop of
growing cyber crime, greater complexity thanks to evolving working and digital environments post-covid and an enterprise security landscape that doesn’t rest.
“We’ve continued to grow,” says SCN CEO and founder Tim Kirk, “both from a technical and commercial perspective. The nature of what we do means we have to respond quickly and cater for all our clients. We’ve opened a new Sydney office, where our team of consultants and support staff are delivering our managed services for clients in the city. There’s been some major brands come on board with us over the last year, and it’s a great demonstration that the services we deliver and how we go about doing it is really resonating with the market.
“We’ve had to boost our offering internationally, too,” he adds. “Cyber crime doesn’t sleep and, for our global clients, we have to be able to cover off our SOC and NOC services 24/7. To do that while still keeping true to everything we believe culturally like empowering our team, respecting their time outside of work and, of course, going on the journey with our clients, we took a ‘follow the sun’ approach rather than stick people in front of a computer all day and night like some do. We chose London as the perfect place, and have already registered the business there. Eventually having a site there will mean we can deliver out-of-hours services with fresh people operating all the time. That eradicates mistakes and serves our customers better.”
There’s been several key technology and product developments too, Kirk explains. In June this year, SCN was accepted on the Palo Alto Networks Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) programme, allowing it to offer flexible, cost-effective and bespoke cyber security services. “It’s a great opportunity for us,” he says, “and, for our clients, combines Palo Alto’s best-in-breed technology with a very capable services partner in SCN. It means we can offer bespoke services when they’re needed, which is a real benefit for some of the smaller companies that want the very best security without having to sign up for long-term packages. We’ve also launched our next-gen SOC, which includes ingestion of network, endpoint detection and cloud, and uses machine learning to detect anomalies, which significantly improves an analyst’s threat hunting capabilities.”
All of this means a busy year ahead, in which we will continue to build on these developments further while also aligning our work to several key trends that drive the sector. “My vision for the business over the next year is to double in capacity,” says Kirk, looking ahead to the new financial year. The last 12 months have seen significant growth and development for the business, but there’s more to come.
“Some of the opportunities I see are the continuation of our advanced endpoint security and security orchestration and response, and making sure we are responding in an automated fashion to dynamic threats,” Kirk says. “Ultimately, that’s the reason we do what we do. We’ve also just released a threat hunting service called Cychec, which will allow us to proactively sweep environments for Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and threats on a continuous basis. From a network security standpoint, we’re also seeing a shift from expensive MPLS to commodity internet circuits for remote office connectivity. That could save clients huge amounts of money and, from a security perspective, it provides layer 7 inspection and control and adds a huge amount of visibility.
These trends, says Kirk, will help SCN develop our business while working in partnership with our clients and going on the journey together to improve their security. “We want to expand by 50%,” he adds. “We’ll further bolster the services we have along the way – we’re not looking for revolution, we’re looking for evolution in what we do. We want to branch out but not damage our core offering, which is part of the SCN DNA.”
