Breach Response Insights from Industry Expert, Ian Kelly
It’s not a matter of if, but when a company will experience a data breach. Nobody knows this better than Ian Kelly. With more than 13 years of experience and his role as SVP of Breach Services for a breach response industry leader, he has helped many companies and organizations recover from cyberattacks. We sat down with Ian to talk about ZeroFox’s recent acquisition of IDX, the evolving cybersecurity space, and more.
Q: Hi Ian, could you introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a bit about your role at IDX?
A: Hi, I’m the Senior VP for Breach Services. I’ve been with the company for over 13 years and have seen a lot of changes and evolutions to the breach market. IDX has grown a lot over the years and as we have evolved with the breach market, my team has grown to meet those market demands.
Q: With ZeroFox’s recent acquisition of IDX, is there anything you want existing IDX customers to know?
A: First, their experience with IDX will only be more exceptional. They will still be working with the same great team. The opportunities that the combined company will provide will not only improve our customer experience, but the technology and innovative culture that ZeroFox brings will allow us to innovate faster. We are beginning to add new features that weren’t available in the past, while providing superior customer support with the same great response services.
Q: It’s great to hear that! Any new benefits to ZeroFox’s customers?
A: The exciting thing is that we are providing a larger continuum of services now. Our dark web monitoring is getting more advanced and can be more proactive in alerting clients when something is wrong. These early detection services will better allow us to assist customers once they experience an incident.
The combined company provides unique market disrupting solutions. We can now address external cyber and privacy risks outside the perimeter and across the entire security lifecycle - from proactive protection to incident response and breach notification/resolution.
Q: Any additional value you would like to add or highlight with the new partnership?
A: I’m very excited about the culture of innovation and the speed at which we'll be able to get things done. There are some really exciting things coming that will enable IDX customers to benefit from ZeroFox's capabilities and vice versa. There are a lot of opportunities for us to introduce risk-reducing services once an organization has been breached. Our tools will help them be proactive with their entire security lifecycle moving forward.
Q: What is the benefit of working with ZeroFox for an end-to-end solution?
A: I actually was talking to some of my ZeroFox colleagues about this earlier today. There isn’t really anybody out there that can provide a complete solution as far as external cybersecurity, incident response and forensics, combined with breach notification and identity protection. We are the only ones out there that can provide all of those services to a client.
More and more we are hearing from our customers that they are struggling to manage different vendors and technology solutions. They are really looking for someone who can provide a full suite of services with only one or two touch points within the company so that they don’t have to jump around as they are managing a potentially chaotic situation, such as a data breach.
Q: Do you have any backstory that you could share with our readers about the acquisition?
A: Well it’s an interesting one. We were a ZeroFox customer for a long time. They are the back engine of social media monitoring for our identity and privacy protection services. The more we partnered with them the more we came to understand the ways in which we could compliment each other. Whether it’s dark web monitoring, social media monitoring, or other technologies, the intel and disruption services they can provide really appealed to us. We had similar aspirations and synergy with one another, as well as a unique set of solutions that the market has yet to see.
Q: How do you see the cybersecurity space evolving?
A: The market evolves with the threats. The issue with the cybersecurity space is that it’s sort of a game of cat and mouse where the good guys are the mouse. We are reacting to the newest threat in the space in order to protect people from it. Whether that’s new forms of ransomware or phishing on a corporate level, or national security threats on a macro level. The industry has to react to what the bad actors are doing. All these threat activities originate beyond the corporate perimeter. Adopting a strong external cybersecurity solution makes protection beyond the perimeter possible and can reduce the risk of data breach.
Q: With the evolving landscape, any suggestions to our reader?
A: Breaches, incidents, and data transfers aren’t slowing down any time soon. There are more sophisticated threat actors out there, so using an end-to-end solution like what ZeroFox offers is going to be crucial for companies to protect their reputation, customers, and bottom line. If you are currently looking to proactively have a response vendor at the ready, don’t hesitate to reach out and learn more about our breach response solution.