SolCyber: Celebrating the 1 Year Stealthiversary of the Modern MSSP

Today marks the first anniversary of SolCyber’s emergence from stealth. On behalf of Don Dixon, Alberto Yépez, and all of us here at Forgepoint, I wanted to take a moment to congratulate Scott McCrady, David Emerson and team on SolCyber’s rise and incredible progress to date. Here’s a look back at why we incubated SolCyber—the opportunity we saw as well as the impact we’ve experienced—both here at our fund and across our portfolio, as SolCyber delivers on its vision and mission to keep companies and their employees safe from malicious activity.

So why did we incubate SolCyber? Three reasons:

First, we saw a major gap in the market: high target assets that had little to no IT resources and were especially vulnerable to cyber events. Small to medium-size enterprises (SMEs), including venture-backed startups and VC/PE funds, operated with this false sense of security in their basic cybersecurity tools. We saw first-hand how the mid-market—a vast, growing segment of approximately 300K companies with <1000 employees—needed a modern managed security services provider (MSSP) that would be able to swiftly curate and deploy effective and powerful security solutions to protect companies like Forgepoint and our portfolio companies from data breaches, ransomware, and other cyberattacks while mitigating cyber risk.

The concept was simple: combine a tech stack of advanced cybersecurity solutions with an accessible 24/7 customer service model and affordable cost structure that would enable every company to protect their IP, proprietary processes, and tools while safeguarding their most important assets: their employees across identities and endpoints.

The company could leverage the innovative startups in our nearly 40-strong portfolio, partnering to complement each other’s capabilities and go to market together, while providing a great customer experience that reduced vendor overload.

Secondly, we had an unfair advantage—the technical depth and leadership across our network—to create a seamlessly integrated platform guided by the leading experts in our community, starting with our Advisory Council. This collaboration allowed SolCyber to package Fortune 500 level security into an easy to buy, fully managed cybersecurity solution, strategically designed to serve the needs of SMEs across industries. Having CISOs of major enterprises, with deep subject matter expertise, who run organizations that are dealing with large scale and complexity, as your design partners, has been instrumental in identifying, adapting and applying best of breed cybersecurity solutions for the mid-market.

Third, we knew that we could attract exceptional talent to build the business and take it forward. CEO Scott McCrady, who began his career as a Security Architect before gaining 25+ more years of extensive leadership, strategy, and GTM roles for global organizations like Symantec, FireEye, SonicWall, and Ubiq Security, has brought an unparalleled depth of customer understanding and breadth of experience across the leading MSSP’s/Telcos, SIs, and cloud providers to jumpstart the business from day one. CTO David Emerson, who previously served as CISO at Appgate and Cyxtera in addition to technical leadership roles at asset management funds and universities, quickly joined in to build out SolCyber’s technical strategy, platform, and operations. The two continue to bring on board exceptionally dedicated and capable talent all sharing the same mission to do right by SMBs.

SolCyber’s Impact: Close to Home

I’ve always found the term ‘dogfooding’ rather odd: this is more like eating our own steak! Our team here at Forgepoint always planned to be a test customer and benefit from SolCyber’s streamlined approach. The results so far? As a “reformed CIO”, please allow me to say the outcomes have been fantastic. Over the past year, SolCyber has built out their Foundational Coverage, utilizing an array of advanced solutions to help us shore up our own cybersecurity posture, ensure MFA and proper authentication and look after our infrastructure, network, and endpoints. They’ve done this while partnering across our portfolio to introduce and integrate what we need to keep our people, data, and processes safe – collaborating with Forgepoint companies such as:

• Area 1 Security (acq. by Cloudflare): Email Protection and preventing Business Email Compromise
• Attivo Networks (acq. by SentinelOne): Identity Detection and Response
• Cysiv (acq. by Forescout): Security Operations Center as a Service
• Remediant: Privileged Access Management
• Surefire Cyber: Incident Response and Resilience

SolCyber is also expediting access to cyber insurance through its partnership with Converge, another company incubated at Forgepoint. Together the companies aim to make cyber insurance more accessible, affordable, and easier to navigate for all.

SolCyber: Onwards

So what’s ahead for the team? I’m excited for Scott, David and team as they grow and evolve SolCyber by strengthening their Foundational Coverage and cloud delivery strategy as more companies embrace SaaS and build on the cloud. Their soon to be released partner program, platform upgrades including a unified portal view of all security and business data, and continued pursuit of what’s best for customers means team growth is a must.

Scott, David and SolCyber: on behalf of our team, thank you for the continued collaboration and congratulations on all your success to date. Here’s to all that’s ahead in serving this important and growing market with these critical needs.

Leo Casusol is a Partner at Forgepoint. Learn more about his background here.