SEP2 CEO talks bridging the skills gap and how it plans to be a cyber leader

Co-founders Paul Starr and Tim Ward explain their strategy around pinpointing SEP2’s ideal customer profile

SEP2 wants to become a leader in the cybersecurity space through identifying its strong points with the type of organisations it works with.

Last year SEP2 saw success in its headcount growth, expanding from 70 to 100 people and most recently celebrated being named Google's first global threat intelligence OEM partner.

Turning their attention to what they’d like to achieve by the end of 2025, Paul Starr, CEO, and Tim Ward, director of business development at SEP2 lift the lid on their strategy.

“A huge part of our business has been about growth with our SOC and MDR service over the last couple of years,” explains Starr.

“We feel with the investments we're making as a business for our capabilities to our customers, now it’s about taking it to the next stage and becoming a leader in that area.

“I feel we're poised to do that. Where previously it's been about growth, I feel like we will start seeing our name as a go-to and for people to be aware of the services that we provide in that sector.”

He explains the MSSP will achieve this through pinpointing its strengths with its customers.

“A huge part of that has been around identifying where we play strong in terms of the type of organisations we work with,” Starr says.

“We work with small organisations that may have one or two technical people, all the way up to large organisations of more than 125,000 users that have dedicated SOC teams.

“We are very open and look to the entire market at how we can support. But identifying where we play strong has been a big focus for us, to identify our ICP, who we work with the best, and then to really go after those markets quite aggressively.”

Skills gap efforts

Outside of trying to be a leader in the cyber space, SEP2 is also leading the way in bridging the major tech skills gap through a variety of initiatives and programmes.

The World Economic Forum states there is a global shortage of more than 4 million cyber professionals.

Around 637,000 UK businesses (44 per cent) lack basic skills, with employees struggling to confidently perform tasks outlined in the Cyber Essentials scheme, according to a report by GOV.UK.

The proportion of UK businesses with basic and advanced technical skills gaps has not changed significantly across the six years of data. Approximately 390,000 businesses (27 per cent) have gaps in advanced skills, such as penetration testing.

To try and combat this SEP2 introduced its Cyber School initiative.

The programme aims to share opportunities within SEP2’s Leeds SOC to schools and colleges in the area for people from different socioeconomic backgrounds to give them an insight and awareness of what is the art of the possible in the cybersecurity sector.

“The reason we came up with this initiative was around women in cyber and how that can be improved,” Ward explains.

“Through those conversations, we then opened a forum discussion around what we wanted to achieve.

“We also identified low socioeconomic backgrounds, people that don't necessarily think that this is an industry for them, but maybe not even aware that this industry even exists.

“We run such a diverse SOC, we want to look for different minds. We want to have different people that don't fit into the normal, standard cyber image.”

Since starting the SEP2 Apprenticeship Programme in 2020 there have been 23 apprentices.

17 of those were given full-time contracts (74 per cent), 12 of which (71 per cent) are still employed with the company.

The technical team has had 11 apprentices in total, with nine receiving full-time contracts (82 per cent), seven of which are still with SEP2 (78 per cent).

Misleading AI marketing?

AI continues to feature heavily in vendor annual reports, results announcements and interviews, with Salesforce channel chief Steve Corfield recently stating that about 61 per cent of Salesforce’s fourth-quarter AI agent deals were implemented and delivered by partners.

Starr acknowledges both the advantages and disadvantages of AI, commenting on some questionable marketing techniques on the game-changing tech.

“I wouldn't necessarily say it's a complete challenge, because we're using it, and we really benefit from it, but I don’t want the market to get misled on where AI is actually benefiting organisations.

“Being a Google partner, they've moved Gemini into SecOps and there are huge gains to be made with those AI platforms.

“But the concern for me is there are some marketing elements I'm seeing where it's been suggested that AI is just going to completely secure us all.

“I think it's a support mechanism at the moment, it's not necessarily going to take our jobs, and I think we can hugely benefit from it.”