I often get asked why Agio acquired a cybersecurity firm instead of just partnering with an existing provider, like most of our MSP peers.  While there are dozens of quality cybersecurity firms in the market, I knew for us to achieve our vision – of providing our clients with the absolute most secure and reliable environments – we needed to acquire the skills, methodology and overall cybersecurity leadership and discipline in-house. This infusion wasn’t about adding cybersecurity services, it was about having cybersecurity focused professionals in our meetings, setting our goals, listening and contributing to our discussions around our clients’ problems and needs, as well as being a part of operational decisions. Even if we only offered outsourced IT services, it was still critical for me to have those dedicated cybersecurity professionals and leaders infused within our company.

At a more practical level, IT and cybersecurity are NOT separate functions and can’t, nor should they be, viewed separately. One of the most basic needs of any cybersecurity engineer, before they go about securing an environment, is knowing the inventory of the firm they are trying to protect. While “knowing the inventory” certainly isn’t one of the sexiest cybersecurity challenges, we constantly find firms who have separate IT and cybersecurity teams in which the cybersecurity team is only protecting a subset of the firm’s assets because they simply didn’t know other assets existed within the organization.

The integration of cybersecurity and IT under one roof was deliberate, and through this hybrid model, we continue to learn how to make our clients more secure and reliable. It’s a competitive advantage that continues to work in our favor as the threat landscape evolves, and hackers find new ways to exploit weaknesses in a company’s technology systems.

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