Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who are the top managed services providers who are using your technology? Are there some large ones? What is their target audience? I’m trying to understand where in the landscape you are playing.

Fred Wilmot: I think anytime you talk about MSSP’s, you don’t crack the Fortune 500 per se. The mid-market and the SMBs are areas where people don’t have the ability to build up a security organization or an operations environment. In our top-tier, from a customer acquisition perspective, you would see Entity Security and Optive. We have a couple of partners in Australia and the UK doing the same thing. We have a host of smaller ones that really do target SMB.

Sramana Mitra: Based on this segmentation, one question that comes to my mind is, you started off by saying that a lot of the risks have escalated because of IoT. How much is the IoT penetration in the mid-market?

Fred Wilmot: The things that we think about with respect to IoT are very similar in concept to the types of devices that we see. A mid-market might be a credit union. Whether they’re certified or not, the propensity for them to have a device that has implications for transacting money on the wire is significant.

Every branch has this fundamental requirement to process money so they have the same requirements for them to do the due diligence to make sure they’re not doing something that could potentially expose risk. We look at this as the IoT market is not just influenced by the types of communication that happens.

You look at SWIFT, there’re some requirements there. Some network visibility significantly helps influence the ability to understand what that potential risk might be. When you look at a healthcare provider, your healthcare provider also has to be aware of some of the fundamentals around personally-identifiable information like protected health information (PHI) and electronic protected health information (ePHI). Those guys aren’t very big.

What we know is that those organizations have had high levels of compromise upstream. How do we help characterize what those potential risks are for folks that are downstream and don’t have the support infrastructure to do that as part of the visibility that we like to expose. There are some folks that are not very small companies but when we think about where OT merges with IT, this hasn’t really been done before.

You might see some folks that are traditionally what I would consider IT companies. They’ll have a nascent IT presence and security has a very large presence. For example, things that drive, fly, or roll can get amalgamated into that category. Their business is putting things on the rails and in the air.

In those environments, there’s a lot of implications there around what the infrastructure might be subject to that is now a cyber potential as opposed to, historically, it’s just been mechanical. Those would be three different dynamics that help qualify where IoT takes shape around current businesses. It’s not just in the size of the revenue of the organizations but also in the scale and capacity of the IT part.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled
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