Appetite for risk.

One of the reasons for this statement is that we have recognized that the way IT is used in a company has changed massively. In the past, a company would invest in an IT system and then let it run in maintenance mode for three, five or ten years. And then they had to invest a lot of money to replace the system. We believe that has changed now because they are taking advantage of cloud technologies. A lot of the IT is no longer on-premise, it's constantly changing, and that requires a slightly different approach. The IT services we offer as part of co-management or outsourcing take into account that this is now the new norm and we have to accept this constant change.

For many years at the MSP I worked at previously, and I know many other MSPs did the same, we tried to put our clients into pre-defined packages or technology bundles to make it easier for us to deliver these services and meet the SLAs we agreed with our clients.

However, in the face of constant change, it is becoming increasingly difficult to bundle all these elements together. We have therefore realized that one size does not fit all and two or three sizes do not fit all. That's why we need to tailor our range of services to our customers a little more than before. There are still core offers and prices for certain services that we offer, but we have had to become a bit more flexible because we naturally have a different contract and a different scope of services for almost every customer. But we respond to that with really good internal documentation and processes and information about each customer so that we understand what they have and what we're delivering to them. And as things change in their world, which is regularly the case, companies have to adapt to a variety of economic, social, environmental and political pressures that affect their business.

So it's an ongoing dialog that we have with them, not just once a quarter or once a year. It is an ongoing dialog.

Any company that does not have a firewall or anti-virus protection for endpoints is not taking its business seriously. This has been a given for some time, but these things don't cover all the risks that exist today. What has proved to be a game changer for us is the MDR service. We work with some great providers, one of which is Sophos. They have a very good MDR offering that we sell on to our customers, because it would have been very costly to integrate a SOC or SIEM offering into our packages for our customers.

So having a managed offering from a very well-known security provider is a great thing that we can easily offer to our customers. We also offer a range of other complementary services. We offer backup, replication and recovery. We also offer risk management and cyber resilience planning. We try to talk to our customers about their ability to deal with a cyber incident and make sure they are aware of the risks.

Well, I think the co-managed approach is a fairly new approach that a lot of customers are warming up to because they realize that they need to take some of the responsibility for their own IT and especially for their IT security. Our successful approach to IT security is to talk about risks and not just technologies. Because as soon as you start talking about all the technologies, customers think you're trying to sell them something or scare them into buying something. But for us, it's been good to take a step back and try to understand their business a little better. What are the risks for the company? Is it financial risk? Is it the risk of losing data? Is it the risk of their data becoming public? Would a business failure be the biggest risk to the company? By trying to understand the maturity level of the business in terms of different aspects of cyber incident response, we show that we care about their business and are offering them the right technologies and services, rather than trying to sell them something all the time. That has been a great success for us.

I think the biggest challenge for us was managing the different security technologies and vendors and bringing them together into a solution for the customer that met their needs. The more vendors we had and the more technologies we used, the bigger the challenge. Another question we faced was whether we should set up our own Security Operation Center and staff and manage it around the clock. We had to figure out whether or not that would be cost effective for us. In the end, we decided against it. Fortunately, the Sophos MDR offering came along and filled a big gap for us. The biggest hurdles were managing all these different security technologies and their feeds, as well as dealing with all the new threats and potential threats that were emerging in the landscape.

At Adnitor, we've tried to really focus on the customer experience and results. SLAs are really important. They help us and the customer make sure that we do what we need to do, in the time we need to do it, and that we respond properly. But we've added another layer, which is experience. We use it as a kind of benchmark to ensure that we give our customers what they want and need. So an XLA is an agreement on the experience level. So we sit down with the customer and agree a certain level of happiness and satisfaction. Our customers have certain expectations of the services we provide. And we want to make sure that we exceed those expectations. So the experience level is about continually engaging with our clients to ensure that the services and projects we deliver not only achieve the desired results, but also have business value for our clients.