Page 69 - Cyber Defense Magazine RSA Edition for 2021

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 uniformity 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
forward. 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 for complex Azure Sentinel deployments and MDR services? It comes
down to the aforementioned 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 Cyber 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 Cyber 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 Cyber 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 Cyber Command Centers operating within North America. Difenda has
been recognized by IDC Canada as a major cybersecurity service provider for the last five years in a row
and has been featured in the Top 100 Canadian Companies several times in the past.

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