These days, even grandmothers sharing recipes on their PCs are worried about cyber crime. Their stakes may be low—hackers have better targets than chicken casserole secrets. But leaders of Fortune 50, 500, and 1000 companies? That’s a whole other story. As cyberattacks escalate worldwide, they’re losing sleep worrying that they’ll be the next target—and the next global headline.

That’s where Irving-based Cysiv steps in. Its goal is to help those leaders get a good night’s sleep—secure in the knowledge that someone is providing proactive threat detection and managed cybersecurity.

Cysiv had record growth in 2021

Cysiv announced today that it saw record growth in 2021, as demand for security operations center (SOC)-as-a-Service continued to accelerate. The startup doubled its SOC-as-a-Service customer base and its revenue was up more than 100%, with strongest growth in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East and Africa region.

As a result, Cysiv was named the winner of Tech Titans’ 2021 Fast Tech Award, honoring the fastest-growing tech companies in North Texas. Cysiv topped the list of 20 other North Texas-based technology companies with three-year revenue growth of 1,848%.

Partha Panda, the company’s CEO and co-founder, told Dallas Innovates that Cysiv is “actively expanding our team, both locally and globally.” His startup currently has 160 global employees, with its global HQ and a staff of around 30 located in Las Colinas.

A spinout from Trend Micro

Cysiv was launched in 2018 within Trend Micro through a partnership with HITRUST, a data protection standards development and certification organization. Since spinning out as an independent company, it’s made headlines of its own—including a $26 million Series A funding round we wrote about in 2020.

Cysiv is an innovator in the SOC-as-a-service field. It combines all elements of a proactive, threat-hunting security operations center with a managed security stack for hybrid cloud, network, and endpoint security, according to the company. 

As a key differentiator, Cysiv combines its cloud-native next gen SIEM with a data-centric approach, and offers a team of experts that operate as a “seamless extension” of a client company’s own security operations center.

Growing client list

The company’s client list now includes Fortune 50, 100, 500, and 1000 companies. It’s been selected by digital native and high-growth companies across a wide range of sectors, including fintech, SaaS/business services, digital health, mobile commerce, manufacturing, and consumer.

“We’re very proud to have been entrusted by so many businesses, and to be operating as a seamless extension to their SecOps teams, as a true strategic security partner,” Panda said in a statement. “The rapid growth we’re experiencing is validation of our unique service offering, which combines a data-centric approach, our own cloud-native next-gen SIEM platform, and a response-centric SOC model.”

Getting ahead of the bad guys by detecting ‘true threats’ fast

Cysiv’s biggest task is detecting and responding to “true threats”—high-fidelity malicious threats that have been human-verified—before they can lead to a disruptive or damaging breach.

Who’s behind the threats? It might be “a cybercriminal or nation state trying to break into their network, steal data, [or] disrupt their operations,” Panda said.

The challenge: “IT/security teams are flooded with low-fidelity alerts that might be threats, but there’s not enough info to tell for sure, without further time-consuming investigation,” Panda said. “Companies lack the technology, people, or expertise to do a proper job of this important work.”

In contrast, Cysiv, through its SOC-as-a-service, “quickly and consistently finds the true threats that these security teams really need to focus their time on,” Panda said. “True threats are confirmed malicious threats—the “needles in the haystack”—that clients absolutely need to be quickly aware of and that need to be acted upon.”

Responding to threats through data, tech, and people

Cysiv helps companies respond to threats with the help of data, technology, and people.

“Security is increasingly a big data problem,” Panda said. “Cysiv excels at understanding the detection value of different data sources” from across a client’s full IT environment and from a broad range of sources, “and then processes and enriches the data in a way that makes it quickly and fully valuable to our automated threat detection processes.”

“We’ve developed our own SaaS security platform that automates and accelerates the process of sifting through all this data in near real-time, analyzing it, correlating it with other threat intelligence we have, and applying a range of detection techniques to identify the threats that warrant human investigation,” Panda added.

But all roads lead to the people behind the platform.

“Our security and threat experts use our platform to then investigate these high-fidelity indicators to identify the true threats, that they then pass to our client’s security team for remediation,” Panda said. “Or, some clients ask us to respond to the threat directly to prevent a successful data breach or attack.”

Putting all that together is how Cysiv helps clients reduce their risk.

“Our SOC-as-a-Service combines data, technology and experts to deliver better detection and faster response of true threats, and we deliver it all as a subscription service,” Panda said.

Helping companies with ‘cloud first’ strategies

A world of data living in the cloud has brought great benefits to companies and consumers alike. But it’s also a breeding ground of cyber dangers.

“The vast majority of enterprises today have embraced or adopted a ‘cloud first’ strategy,” Panda said. That means all their applications, from Microsoft Office to Salesforce to Backoffice and more, live in the cloud, along with the apps they’re building as their core service, like a fintech company’s SaaS platform.

“It’s increasingly difficult to detect and respond to true threats that target these cloud applications,” Panda said. “Cysiv, as a cloud-first company, is uniquely well-suited to helping these companies quickly address the need for 24/7 security monitoring.”

Cysiv isn’t big on false alarms

When Cysiv tells clients there’s a problem, there’s usually a problem. The company says that in 2021, 85% of all cases it escalated to clients worldwide turned out to be “true threats.” Less than 15% of Cysiv cases were false positives, the startup says, comparing favorably to industry standards of 40 to 80%.

For many clients, Cysiv says it actually delivered fewer than 5% false positives.

Once a true threat was detected and confirmed by the platform as a critical or high potential security incident, Cysiv says it took less than five minutes to respond, either by initiating a pre-approved, manual, or programmatic response measure on behalf of the client, or by telling the client how to address the threat.

Clients weigh in

Cysiv offered quotes from clients to support its record:

“Cysiv is an integral extension of our team, providing us with collaborative and highly responsive 24/7 threat monitoring and security management services,” said Scott Moser, SVP and chief information security officer at Sabre, the Southlake-based travel tech company.

Jan Schmidt, global director of IT for Gorillas—a Berlin, Germany-based grocery delivery company—said his firm chose Cysiv “because we needed a security partner that shared a similar DNA to ours: bold, fast, built for growth, and born in the cloud.”

“Cysiv’s approach to delivering modern SOC-as-a-service—combining a data science- and automation-driven next generation SIEM platform, with a strong, collaborative working relationship, and predictable billing model, is refreshing and unique,” said Dagmar Ostermann-Held, director of information security for Western Reserve Hospital in Ohio.

Addressing a long list of pain points

As it continues to grow, Cysiv looks to keep more clients happy by addressing a long list of pain points—from data breaches to compliance issues, cloud and IoT security, “alert fatigue,” and the continual need to improved Sec-Ops to further reduce risk.

And of course, the biggest pain point of all—the “true threat” that lies just around the corner.

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