Government scheme participant plans to set up security VAR
Kiran Bhagotra is part of the HutZero programme that aims to help cybersecurity entrepreneurs develop start-ups
A participant in a government-funded cybersecurity start-up programme hopes to set up a VAR that will give SMBs access to enterprise-level security platforms.
Last week, the government launched the HutZero programme which sees 23 cybersecurity entrepreneurs undergo a three-month period of mentoring from experts recruited from academia, business and government.
The HutZero programme is run by cybersecurity accelerator and incubator Cyber London (CyLon) as part of the government's National Cyber Security Programme.
One participant of the programme, Kiran Bhagotra, claims to have identified a gap in the market, in that the security platforms used by large enterprises and government departments are largely inaccessible to smaller businesses.
With the new venture, Bhagotra aims to start up a VAR offering enterprise-level security platforms to SMBs.
While Bhagotra said there are a small amount of resellers around the world offering these solution to SMBs already, she claimed they only offer solutions from one vendor, whereas she plans to compare the best options from multiple vendors for the end-user.
Bhagotra most recently worked in the Cabinet Office and Foreign Office, in the Office for Cyber Security and Information Assurance.
"What I'm going to end up effectively doing is buying capacity on their [enterprise security vendors] platform as if I were some kind of government department or large enterprise, and then breaking that bulk capacity down into chunks," Bhagotra said.
"[The platforms] have only recently become available to government and enterprise, so it's not as though this sort of thing could have been made available to them earlier because it wasn't even open to the bigger players.
"I want to open that up to SMBs and the best way to do that, because of the cost of these things, is to become a reseller and partner of the technology providers who build these platforms for government and enterprises."
Bhagotra could not disclose which vendors she is currently in negotiations with, but said she has reached out to vendors in the UK and Israel, and will be speaking to US-based vendors soon. She hopes to be in the final stages of these discussions by early 2017.
Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at EuroLAN, said that it is hard to educate SMBs in alternative security options because they are generally used to using free solutions. He added that vendors could quite easily offer a similar solution themselves.
"I think there's an idea there, but it's one that can be blocked by the vendor themselves by saying 'why don't we do that?' So I would have thought it would be quite short term," he said.
"The education of SMBs is just so difficult," he added. "It's an interesting approach but it seems a lot of work rather than just going out there selling security."