Michael Petrov, CEO, and Founder of Digital Edge shares some information about his company and offers insights into current cybersecurity threats.
Please share your company background, how you got started, and what is your mission?
Digital Edge is a strategic Cybersecurity and Compliance consulting partner. It was founded in 1998 as a Managed Service Provided for critical IT infrastructures. Our mission is to help businesses to operate securely in cloud environments. We source, train, and develop engineering and cybersecurity talent, ensuring the highest professionalism and quality delivered to our clients.
What is the main service Digital Edge offers?
Cybersecurity and Privacy compliance in public clouds. We also help companies deploy and operate in public clouds. We provide engineering expertise & insight to our clients for optimizing their operation in the cloud. Setting up governance, policies, and procedures for secured operation in the public clouds is another one of our key services.
Who is your target market?
We work within the SMB sector and are a strong partner for companies operating critical information technology infrastructures. We are very effective in helping startups to mature and secure their product development and delivery processes.
Some of the sectors that we focus on are::
– FinTech
– Financial Services
– Non-for-profit
– Manufacturing
– Health care
What helps you stay ahead of your competition?
Undoubtedly our culture sets us apart from our competition. We support and encourage professional development on all levels. This in turn enables us to provide more insight and resources to all of our clients across all geographies and in every service we provide. Delivering the highest quality work on schedule is our mission every day.
As a business, you offer four promises – Stability, Security, Efficiency, and Compliance. How do you ensure that this promise is met- particularly as the company has expanded?
We strongly believe in standards. Standards help companies organize processes, metrics, KPIs, and guardrails. Digital Edge is a long-time ISO-certified organization that implements controls around the quality and security of the services. We ensure that we’re consistently delivering these four qualities to our clients through methodical reviews of KPIs, measurement of performance, and a rigorous personal development program.
What do you think are the worst cyber threats today?
The worst cyber threat today is the lack of formal cyber security programs in organizations. For example, in the military, a fortress can store many weapons and ammunition. Still, those weapons will remain idle unless training, standard operating procedures, practices, and processes are provided. It is unfortunate, but an organizations’ workforce is still the largest cybersecurity weakness. Digital Edge constantly teaches our clients how to make this biggest weakness a strength.
What is the best way to improve the reliability of a cybersecurity program?
If we can only provide one piece of advice, select the appropriate cybersecurity standard (ISO, NIST, SOC, etc.) and implement it thoroughly. People can become overwhelmed with standards because they perceive that all of the controls need to be implemented. However, that is not the case, as the controls need to be selected to fit the business. Moreover, the spirit of cybersecurity standards is constant improvement and measurement rather than implementing it once and forgetting. Said another way, a cybersecurity program is a process, not a product
As a company, do you use AI and machine learning to help identify abnormal behavior?
Well, AI is a big hype today. I was programming in the LISP language in the 90s. Yes, there has been massive progress since then, but we have a joke in IT engineering – artificial intelligence is still dumb without human intelligence.
We are a service company. We deal with risks and mitigations; however, our partners – antimalware products, SIEM products, detection, and traffic analysis products are innovating in the area of AI. Also, it’s worth noting that the heuristic detection method becomes more valuable than simple signature detection.