Integrity360 boss on global ambitions, attracting senior staff from Orange Cyberdefense and rising cyber threats from Russian invasion

Executive chairman Ian Brown tells CRN the private equity-backed cybersecurity firm is primed for more M&A across Europe following acquisition of UK

Integrity360 is primed for more M&A across Europe following its acquisition of London-based cybersecurity firm Caretower last week.

The Dublin cybersecurity specialist became a £70m-revenue business last week after acquiring Microsoft, Sophos, Kaspersky and Check Point partner Caretower.

The London-based firm turned over £28m in 2021, Integrity360 claims, and has offices in London and Sofia, Bulgaria.

Speaking to CRN, Integrity360's executive chairman Ian Brown said the acquisition gives more balance to the business with a larger footprint in the UK. Before the acquisition, around two thirds of the cybersecurity firm's business was in Ireland with the remaining third in the UK.

Brown said more M&A is on the cards, across northern and southern Europe, as the business sets out its global ambitions.

The firm has an "aspiration" of reaching €200m in sales within the next few years, Brown said, and this year the business will reach around €85m.

Integrity360 was itself acquired by Secure Data and Air IT investor August Equity in June 2021. At the time, Integrity360 said the investment would fund M&A across Europe.

Brown told CRN that, following the Caretower acquisition, Integrity360 is planning more M&A deals across northern Europe and "select parts" of southern Europe.

Acquisitions overseas will help Integrity gain "feet on the street" in key countries where its customers have operations, Brown said.

"A lot of our customers have offices and operations in other parts of Europe. Obviously, you can do a lot of things remotely from one location anyway, but it certainly does help to have some feet on the streets in operation in those countries," he said.

"There are some things that is just very difficult [to do remotely]. Sometimes you've just got to go to a datacentre in-person to carry out some work where it can be too challenging or too risky to do it remotely."

Brown said that the Irish business is already in on-going conversations with other M&A targets. Possible targets could have anything from €10m in annual revenue up to north of €40m, he said.

It is "perfectly possible" for Integrity360 to make another acquisition this year, Brown added, but added the caveat that M&A talks are often long, drawn out processes that can sometimes come to nothing.

"One of the things about this game is nothing's ever done until it's done. Acquiring a company is a multi-month process with diligence legal, all the rest of it, and you go through various twists and turns on that journey and it can come to a halt the day before. We try to avoid those situations but sometimes it does happen," he said.

Attracting talent from competitors

Brown said that Integrity360 plans to boost its headcount across the board, including in its newly acquired security operations centre in Sofia, Bulgaria.

But the cybersecurity firm has also been successful in attracting several heavy-hitters from its competitors. Two account directors joined Interity360 from Orange Cyberdefense last year along with other senior staff in presales and Orange Cyberdefense's network operations centre.

Orange Cyberdefense is partly made up of Secure Data, a UK cybersecurity firm that was sold to Orange in 2019 by Integrity360's current investor August Equity.

Brown was formerly executive chairman of Secure Data leading up to its sale to Orange.

The executive chairman said that Integrity hasn't specifically targeted Orange Cybersdefense staff, but added that the senior staff will help accelerate Integrity360's growth even faster.

"We've had a lot of people knock on our door," he said.

"We've been fortunate enough to attract quite a lot of people. We're very excited to have them on board and a lot of them are very senior and seasoned people. That helps with what we're trying to achieve with our overall aspirations. We've got high calibre people who have been round the block in cyber for 15 to 20 years and know what they're doing. That helps us get to where we want to get to fast."

Russian war raises cyber threat level

Brown warned that Russia's cyberwarfare against Ukraine, in attempts to disable core infrastructure, communications and public services, will have wider ramifications on the West.

The tools frequently used by everyday hackers are often first developed by state actors in attacks such as what we're witnessing in Ukraine.

"I think that's going to ripple around the world as a result of what Mr. Putin has decided to do," he said.

"We've already started to have conversations with customers about it because they're worried about their estates. A lot of hacks and attacks can sometimes start through tools that were developed by state actors. They're developed by the smart brains in the American or the Russian intelligence services. And then, unfortunately, what happens sometimes is that those tools leak out into the marketplace and they get picked up by criminal enterprises."

Meanwhile a general trend of digital transformation among businesses, which often involves the adoption of cloud services and new software, could also leave customers vulnerable.

"A big mistake that organisations fall into is thinking that their data is all in the cloud and therefore it's secure. Totally, totally, wrong. It is just as vulnerable there as it is in a datacentre you might have sitting down the road from your office.

"Cloud infrastructure isn't actually that secure - even if it is provided by one of the goliaths being either Amazon or Microsoft. It's not a get-out-of-jail card for your security."