SecOps as a Service; The Future of <strong>Cyber</strong>security By Manoj Arora, CEO & Founder, Difenda 68
The cybersecurity industry was a different place when I founded Difenda in 2008. I saw the same issue over and over again—companies misled by the cybersecurity “leaders.” Technology resellers promising the impossible. Vendors overselling functionality. Managed services focusing on the wrong things. A disconnected cybersecurity processes. There was no uni<strong>for</strong>mity in the industry and it led to poor customer experiences across the board. I wanted to change that dynamic—to create a company that was all-in on the customer’s outcome. This trend motivated me to start Difenda. Through this journey, I made an important discovery. I saw that the future of cybersecurity needs to be an integrated, connected, and collaborative experience that unified departments and provided total visibility into the people, processes, and technology that drive companies <strong>for</strong>ward. I knew this would be a sustainable strategy - and based on Difenda’s growth over the last 13 years, we must have done something right. Reinventing Managed Services Let me start by saying that I passionately believe success in cybersecurity is a by-product of customers' success. Customer outcomes should always be the top priority. So, how did we – Difenda – go from an unknown start-up to one of Microsoft’s leading North American partners, and their go-to partner <strong>for</strong> complex Azure Sentinel deployments and MDR services? It comes down to the a<strong>for</strong>ementioned success. Difenda started its first cybersecurity operations center in 2013. Since then, we have served a wide variety of customers in extremely data-sensitive industries like banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, and mining. While most service providers offered managed services as an add-on to their product resale, we took a different approach. Focusing on customer success, we completely reengineered our managed service offering from the ground up, concentrating on integrity, sustainability, and the competence expected from a Security Operations Center (SOC). Upon relocating our SOC to Oakville, Ontario, we doubled down on our customer success paradigm by building our ISO 27001 <strong>Cyber</strong> Command Center (C3) in 2016, using some of the most advanced security operations technology available. The following year, our continued success was recognized in 2017 when we were invited by <strong>Cyber</strong> New Brunswick's to establish a presence in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, as part of a public-private partnership to fight cyber threats to critical infrastructure across the country. In dedication to this partnership, we established a secondary <strong>Cyber</strong> Command Center in Fredericton Throughout our growth, we’ve retained our ISO 27001 Certification, SOC2 Type 2 Certification, and are one of very few highly certified <strong>Cyber</strong> Command Centers operating within North America. Difenda has been recognized by IDC Canada as a major cybersecurity service provider <strong>for</strong> the last five years in a row and has been featured in the Top 100 Canadian Companies several times in the past. 69