Ackcent above and beyond in Spain with Stuart McClure, President and Founder at Cylance

Past May 30th, ISMS Forum, Spanish Association for the Promotion of Information Security, celebrated the 21st edition of the International Information Security Conference Cyber Risk Appetite in the new Digital Revolution, one of the most relevant cybersecurity events in Spain with the participation of 800 professionals, presentations and debates with the presence of recognized experts highlighting the keynote of Stuart McClure, President and Founder at Blackberry Cylance, Ackcent‘s strategic partner.

But let’s travel in time. It was March 2016 at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, the top reference cybersecurity congress worldwide, where we discovered something new and revolutionary that we were sure we needed to explore. That was the first time we saw an AI platform to prevent attacks, not just a buzzword, it was Cylance. Stuart used to be one of the keynote speakers at the RSA, you can see his conference here: Hacking Exposed LIVE: Attacking in the Shadows.

After a couple of months of testing Cylance effectiveness and performance at our Ackcent Labs, benchmarking with traditional antivirus solutions, we were highly impressed with the results. We had in our hands the opportunity to make something different, aligned with the Ackcent mindset, not just being a me too. So, Ackcent became a pioneer in Europe to provide MDR services based on Cylance.

Part of this strategic partnership actions and due to this successful collaboration, past year in September 2018, Lluí­s Vera, CEO at Ackcent held meetings with Cylance top management at the headquarters in Irvine (Los Angeles metropolitan area). And it was there were Stuart and Lluí­s agreed to visit Spain and take the opportunity to participate at this year ISMS congress.

It was a great challenge at the beginning to displace traditional solutions with a huge market share, even not being effective against Wannacry, similar or more complex attacks; the brand recognition was low and had few customers, at least in Europe. But nowadays it is completely different. We have a great satisfaction after more than 3 years working with Cylance, our team as well as our customers, which has helped us to achieve more than a hundred of installations, positioning Ackcent at the top Cylance MSSP in Europe, as well as helping with Cylance growth with a new team in Spain.

The future is also very promising. Pay attention to the upcoming roadmap, with again disruptive approaches among others to prevent identity theft, insider threats and DLP applying AI to those areas.