[Music] [Music] thank you [Music] in this edition of In CEO talks I'm joined by Alan gabord the CEO of integrated cyber and yes we are talking about the business of cyber security what you can do about it and the tools that integrated cyber bring to its clients and the marketplace that this represents Alan welcome thank you nice to be here appreciate it I I'd like to start with a little bit of a a state of the nation in in a sense of what the uh Internet Security landscape looks like what's happening out there uh


where are their vulnerabilities especially the small and medium-sized companies yeah you know the the thing is is the the bad guys are going after the small and medium-sized companies because they basically don't have the defenses that the large corporations do the other sort of introduction that's come up come around lately is artificial intelligence artificial intelligence style is creating a whole new dimension uh in the cyber security field it's a it's a war between us and Them how how far how much


they can invest and how much we can invest in keeping up with each other the interesting thing about cyber that a lot of people forget though is it's still a relatively new field it hasn't been around for a long time therefore it's it's sort of in its infancy stages but it's going to advance quite quickly so the the the the the the atmosphere out there for the smaller mid-sized businesses is very dangerous the other thing that the bad guys are doing is they're looking to the small companies


to penetrate them to move up the supply chain to the larger corporations so in general it's a very dangerous time right now so you're saying they're targeting small companies as a Gateway into the com the companies that those may be smaller companies are connected to because once you're inside you then have contact information to uh bigger uh and probably more profitable uh Cyber attack targets that's correct I mean just look at the defense industry the defense industry contractors what these guys are doing is


they're going after the weakest link the smallest link they can find penetrating it and allowing them to sort of work their way up the chain they recognize that going at the top is not the answer to the question that they need to stop with the lower end because that's where the vulnerability or the the the the the lack of sort of protection is so they're they're really focusing on that small end you can see that even in some of the uh major uh ransomware attacks have been happening


around the country it's not the big guys they're going after right away they're going after the suppliers to the big guys okay you talked about the weakest link is the weakest link a small company um because it doesn't have the necessary tools that it needs and it unfortunately relies on the human element that may be so much more easily drawn in on a phishing scheme or some other kind of attack yeah that's exactly right over 80 percent of all of the issues that happened with ransomware are all these


all of these other attacks come from people inside the corporation doing dumb things everybody thinks that they're spending millions and millions of dollars on all these sort of protectors outside the company where really the focus is on the inside where the issues really exist that's why our company we focus on creating a platform that allows us to integrate all of the sort of tools that are coming in from the outside putting them into a data pool so we can analyze and look at what we think are


the real threats in integrating all of that which right now most of these companies out here today have everything that is sort of stovepiped and the bad guys are looking for ways to get in between what we then do is we present it to our user community in a usually user understandable way so they can see where the real threats are coming from and how to remediate them in addition we provide a managed service who is constantly does vulnerability assessments phishing tests training education to allow these


companies to really be focused on the performance of the individuals inside the corporation because that's what the real problem exists so what is it about your tools and training that allow small and medium-sized companies to overcome that resistance to I can't really afford it uh is it really that big of a problem uh trying to find a way to not incur a cost they don't see as being in addition to the bottom line how is it the you know and I and I think that that is is a big challenge so what


is it that you're doing that's helping those companies to make a a decision that's much easier for them to to justify and understand as being a good choice great question what we do is we start with a vulnerability assessment it says let us come in and let us look at your company let us find out where the vulnerabilities May lie and then the results of that we present back to the management team and that allows them to really make a management decision on do I really want this protection how do I


want to prioritize and we work with them on that on one of the most important things you need to focus on down to the least important things and we will work with them on remediating it as I said the first step is really getting a benchmark understanding of what your vulnerabilities really are and it's not an expensive thing to do but the the not doing it can be very expensive it's kind of like having an insurance policy isn't it you're not going to drive your car down the road without an


insurance policy and you got to wonder why are so many companies willing to leave themselves so vulnerable without the appropriate insurance I think what's What's Happening Here is a couple of things one is that the the skill sets in cyber security becoming so specialized like the medical profession you can't just hire General cyber security people in your corporation you really need that specialized approach that's why we've created a network of over 200 cyber Security Experts around


the world that we bring into these small companies to specifically deal with their individual problems the other thing that our platform allows us to do is to bring in these the right solutions for that particular company we can actually personalize our solution to each Corporation and the other thing that's interesting is the life expectancy of most of these software Solutions today is 18 to 24 months and a lot of cyber companies are building their Solutions around a particular piece of software we've decided not to


do that we've created a platform an integration platform that allows us to be sort of future proof whereas new entrants come into the marketplace we can unplug the old plug into new thus keeping our companies up to date with exactly what's going on in the industry so we chose a bit of a different route than most cyber companies and so you're making your programs and platforms agile which really allows you then to be a service not just a program exactly exactly what we do is we call the humanization of of cyber we're able


to plug in all of these Technology Solutions aggregate them into what we call a data Lake use artificial intelligence and Knowledge Management to synthesize the results and to want to identify where the real threats are and then present them on the other side in a humanly understandable way the mo a lot of the solutions today all they do is to provide volumes and volumes and volumes of this is what's happening to your company but no real way of fixing it or no real way of of adequately understanding it so being a former CIO


myself and dealing with all of this we decided that we're going to create a a new a different type of integration where we're not we're sort of agnostic but what we've done is created a technology on one side and the humanization on the other so for investors they're looking at this and they're saying okay what does this Market uh this space look like as far as opportunity is concerned well as I said it's still an infancy strange stages but it's it's in the billions the reason that we chose the


SMB Market too is because um they don't have the capability or capacity to invest like the larger corporations do but there's tens of thousands of them just the United States alone and More in Canada and more around the world and we feel that that this this Market is really ripe for our kind of service where we can really bring them the capabilities that the large corporations have at a very affordable price we have created an internal cost structure that's very low on fixed cost and very high on variable costs so that


way they're we're able to provide these services and and generate margins at a much lower level than the competition can do so what's the message to investors right now who might be looking at you going okay why now uh why should I get behind you at this point what's the opportunity for me well I think what the the big issues the big issues are with our company is we have an experience management team myself and the rest of our leadership have had experience both at providing multi-billion dollar companies and


running startups which is very unique in the industry we've spent a lot of years over the Target and we felt that the perspective that we have created is one that is really what need what the market needs right now uh instead of going out and selling software Point Solutions we're out there selling an environment where people can use soft that use the Cyber tools that we create them to better understandably manage their risks and their needs and their responses and we work with them we don't just throw


the information out to them we come back to them and say let us partner with you and help you resolve these issues as well and the important thing is create an infrastructure with Education and Training is important because one of the things that we do is create a good set of reporting mechanisms where management can now use those as part of annual reviews however to to to understand employee Behavior because if there's no consequence people don't change Behavior so by bringing these tools in in into


the marketplace it helps us to to create that dimension for the management as well great time to be looking at integrated cyber thank you I think it is yes well thank you very much for your time today [Music]