AI-Driven vCISO Platforms Create Pricing and Liability Shifts for MSPs—David Primor of Cynomi

Dave Sobel (0:01)

David Primor, you are the Chief Executive Officer for Cynomi. Welcome to The Business of Tech.

David Primor (0:07)

Thanks, Dave. Pleasure to be here.

Dave Sobel (0:10)

So let's start at the top. You shipped your largest release in the company's history in June. Give me the 90-second version of what actually changed for the partner that morning.

David Primor (0:20)

Yeah. June, you know June was a few months ago, and we have so many other features coming since then. So in June, we released sets of integrations, as we believe that we must be part of the ecosystem, the MSP ecosystem. Vulnerability management, since then, we added EDR. And we are going to add PSA integration very, very soon, and going to have a few integrations of PSA, Penetration testing. So we focus our team in creating lots of integrations, taking the data from the ecosystem of the MSP, and translating into the insights in Cynomi. So this is very, very important thing that we are doing. We are adding coworkers, and coworkers is a very cool thing. So we are trying to understand what are the main processes of the CSO, or the virtual CSO in the MSP and MSSP, and trying to get it to very few minutes.

So how can you shorten the time of assessment? This is a very big challenge. In the last version, it was several hours instead of days or weeks.

But now we are going to take it to less than 60 minutes. So we are having the combination of a portfolio understanding, asking questions about the MSP, asking question about the specific end customer, and giving the MSP the ability to create their own assessments with their own scope, taking information from scanners, taking information from integration and making the assessment a very quick process. And this is in combination with AI co-workers that take the different processes that the CISO is doing, like creating a remediation plan, a roadmap. So taking all the information from the tasks, from the compliance, and making a suitable and very precise remediation plan. Something very exciting that we are doing is reporting agents that help you with AI to create your own report.

Creating co-workers that taking the findings from integration and automatically correlated to the tasks and see conflicts.

Dave Sobel (3:04)

Now, let's make this tangible, particularly for like a smaller MSP. I'm thinking say five or 10 person MSP right now. What's the, of everything you've just talked about, what's the one thing they should focus that's available right now, that they should focus on is like the key thing to know?

David Primor (3:21)

Yeah. So they can assess quickly any company they have. They can generate remediation plan almost out of the box. So we're asking several questions.

They can take the information from external scanning from Cynomi or integrate it with Microsoft or with other vulnerability management that they might use, like Tenable or CaffeLore or others, and getting a very fast plan to share with the customers in order to understand what is the next step, how to create a cybersecurity roadmap, and if they would like to provide assessments or they would like to provide compliance to regulations like CMMC, like HIPAA, ISO 2701, NIST, CSF, whatever, they could use Cynomi in order to do that and to be prepared for now.

Dave Sobel (4:24)

Now, when I was reading the release, you say that an MSP with 15 clients can spend up to 120 hours a week on manual security administration. That's three full-time people doing nothing else.

Where does that number come from, and what is it after Cynomi?

David Primor (4:43)

Yeah, so we understand that if you want to assess a company and understand what is the security posture, in order to first understand what are the risks, trying to quantify that, understand what is the cybersecurity posture and how you improve it, and then to create a plan and to prioritize that, because you know that the end customer, together with the MSP, they cannot do everything.

If we are trying to understand what are the time it takes for MSP to assess a company, to ask all these questions, to have those interviews, it's hours and hours and hours, and we are working with MSPs that turning this manual process into automatic process.

The assessment is the first step. Second is when you try to provide this plan or the compliance for a compliance report for regulation, understanding what is the next step, understand what are the next tools that MSP would like and needs to provide to its customers. This takes a lot of time. And working with hundreds of MSPs in Cynomi, trying to understand what takes them the most of the time and how they can expand. How can one CISO is doing the task of three CISOs? I think that this is what Cynomi is trying to achieve. And by applying AI and adding more and more features, we are enabling the MSPs to do something that they couldn't do. We see cybersecurity, compliance, insurance requests, and those companies need help from MSPs. Currently, MSPs are very short of talent, and even if they have this demand, they don't have enough people to provide these assessments, either it's compliance or just cybersecurity or just to provide a standardized security posture and to understand where they stand from a security perspective. And with Cynomi, they now can do that. So they can add more services and they can answer this demand from end customers.