Industry veteran and founder of LMNTRIX, a cybersecurity provider of Australian origins, shares his observations of the industry, then and now.

LMNTRIX prides itself on keeping up with new innovations and threats across cloud, SaaS, and AI-based cybersecurity tools. It was founded by Carlo Minassian, whose over two decades of experience showed him that cybersecurity budgets of billions are not keeping hackers at bay and in fact, were possibly contributing to alerts fatigue and hurdles to effective cybersecurity.

This was only two of a number of things he observed about cybersecurity industry, and it served as the impetus for the creation of ‘Active Defense’ as an idea, about eight years ago.

Today, the LMNTRIX Active Defense is a validated and integrated threat detection and response architecture for addressing advanced and unknown threats that bypass an organization’s perimeter controls.

In Carlo’s own words (which can be found on the website here), Active Defense is a mindset whereby cybersecurity professionals need to stop fixating on the perimeter and start looking at their network as an obstacle course where hackers could be deceived, worn down, paralyzed and ultimately thwarted.

He said, “You protect what matters; they go away empty handed. This was about changing the economics of hacking. Make the cost of the hack impossible for the hackers to justify and you win.”

LMNTRIX today

During the 2nd MCION Summit in Penang, CXpose.tech caught up with Carlo at the sidelines to find out what the vendor had been up to in the past few years. He shared, “On a personal level I have never experienced so much interest in the company from venture capital, or VC, and an acquisition perspective. So, (cybersecurity) is a very hot market and especially from VCs in the US.”

“You protect what matters; they go away empty handed. This was about changing the economics of hacking. Make the cost of the hack impossible for the hackers to justify and you win.”

He also noted that due to advancements in technology, and more specifically information technology (IT), the number of threat vectors are constantly moving, and LMNTRIX as well as enterprises need to move and keep up to be able to continue to provide protection.

Carlo owes the VC interest they are experiencing to the fact that LMNTRIX builds and owns its own intellectual property (IP) technology. This contributes to significantly larger profit margins than if LMNTRIX was just reselling products and solutions.

But besides that, what LMNTRIX offers is a platform play. “When a customer subscribes to one product or application (on a platform), they are very easily able to subscribe to 11 more. Then the cost savings could be achieved five times faster than if they were buying 12 different products,” Carlos explained.

The growth factor

Retaining talent is also a major challenge, especially in the Malaysian market where companies are all competing for the same pool of skilled cybersecurity professionals.”If you look at the Malaysian market, every CIO you talk to whave the same issue of retaining staff. It’s one of the biggest issues they face. And the problem is consistent across the world.”

To address this, LMNTRIX takes a global approach to hiring for its managed services provider team, advertising open positions in 52 countries to find high-quality talent. For example, they would receive over 1,000 applications for a single analyst position. “We have had very good experience with APAC compared to the rest of the world, it is probably five times more cost-effective. So, that has been one of our strategies to grow our team.”

Carlo stated that to replicate LMNTRIX’s capabilities in-house, an enterprise would need to build out a dedicated 24/7 threat detection and response team, as well as threat intelligence, engineering, and service delivery capabilities.- He noted that for most enterprises, especially smaller ones, this would not be cost-effective to do on their own.

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A recurring theme in our discussion had been the economics of cybersecurity. For many organizations, especially in emerging markets, budget constraints are a significant barrier to implementing robust security measures. As the LMNTRIX founder noted, “Malaysia is similar to most of Southeast Asia. They are straining for budget.”

By offering managed services, LMNTRIX is able to spread the cost and risk across their 500+ customers, making it a more affordable and effective solution for enterprises and small to medium sized businesses.

Total Cost of Ownership

So, total cost of ownership (TCO) is a key factor when evaluating security investments – a seemingly expensive managed service or platform solution may actually be more cost-effective than building and maintaining an equivalent in-house capability.

Another key takeaway from our discussion was how quickly the threat landscape is changing. Carlo said, “The threat is constantly moving and for business leaders, this means cybersecurity can no longer be viewed as a “set it and forget it” proposition.

Continuous adaptation and vigilance are necessary to stay ahead of emerging threats.