InteliSecure building a high-end security-services boutique
The company has raised $22 million in equity financing and a $6 million debt financing in order to buy Pentura – a U.K. managed security service provider – as well as expand its operations globally and hire additional hard-to-find security personnel.
Its premiere service, protecting data by identifying the most critical assets, configuring the infrastructure to enforce security policies and managing it, is highly customized, says CEO Rob Eggebrecht.
InteliSecure consultants spend two months evaluating and defining each customer’s top-priority data and where it is, then figures out how it should be protected from when it’s created, to when it’s consumed to when it’s transmitted. An InteliSecure technical team builds the policies and logic into security platforms at customer sites, then manages the whole package.
The technical teams are made up of five or six members, each of which is assigned to four to six customers, Eggebrecht says, at a price of $18,000 per month. At least one customer has signed on for its own dedicated three- to four-member team that works exclusively for it. Other customers have shown an interest, he says. That kind of personalization doesn’t come cheap - $100,000 per month, and it’s tough to provide.
“It’s hard to staff and it’s incredibly hard to scale,” he says. He says the company has enough teams to handle 70 customers for the shared-team service right now, and has only 50 customers for it, so there is room to grow.
The company has seven of these cyber SOC teams based at its Denver headquarters and by year’s end will have three or four in the U.K. as well.
Part of the reason customers are willing to pay premium prices is that they have the same problem InteliSecure has – finding qualified talent to do the job. Eggebrecht says his customers tell him their in-house security staffers work for two years to get enough experience to move on to another job at higher pay.
With the managed service, InteliSecure becomes a source of stability in customers’ overall security staffing. “We become the static object inside the environment,” he says, “and we train-up their new team members.”
The business has steep financial goals set by the investors – 50% revenue growth per year for three years.
The company has other services beyond its managed data-loss protection. It consults on what security platforms to deploy and actually deploys five – SIEMs, DLP, email and Web-security gateways and vulnerability scanners. It also does penetration testing.
With the acquisition of Pentura, InteliSecure gains a European presence and security operations center, which will help the company address European Union privacy laws and regulations about where data can be sent and stored, Eggebrecht says.
Part of the investment funding will go toward a new SOC in Asia-Pacific and a back-end SOC in Costa Rica, he says. The company has built a forensics lab in Denver and plans to expand the one at Pentura’s facilities.