Dive into the world of cybersecurity innovation with Dror Liwer, the co-founder of CORO, as he shares the journey of revolutionizing the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) cybersecurity industry with groundbreaking solutions.
Unveiling the Origin Story
In a recent brand story episode, Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli engaged in a compelling conversation with Dror Liwer, shedding light on the inception of CORO. Dror's background as a former CIO of the Israeli military police paved the way for the founding of Coro in 2014, with a mission to bridge the gap in cybersecurity solutions for mid-market companies and small businesses.
Solving Real-World Challenges
While the cybersecurity industry often overlooks the needs of mid-market companies and small businesses, CORO identified a critical deficiency in the market. By providing a comprehensive platform with a "power of one" approach, CORO offers a simplified yet effective solution to address the unique cybersecurity challenges faced by these organizations.
Empowering with Affordable Protection
CORO's modular approach allows businesses to tailor their cybersecurity strategy based on their specific needs, without the burden of unnecessary complexities. With affordable pricing and automated cybersecurity tasks, CORO ensures that even organizations with limited budgets and resources can benefit from robust protection.
Tailored Solutions for Every Industry
Recognizing the diverse needs of different sectors, CORO offers specialized suites for industries like education and automotive. By securing both staff and students in educational environments, CORO's tailored solutions demonstrate a commitment to protecting vital institutions against cyber threats.
Partnering for Success
With a strong channel-centric approach, CORO collaborates closely with partners to deliver personalized support and education. From onboarding processes to managed detection and response services, CORO empowers organizations to navigate their cybersecurity journey with confidence.
The Path Ahead: RSA Conference and Beyond
As CORO continues its mission to revolutionize cybersecurity, Dror Liwer's upcoming engagements at the RSA Conference underscore the company's commitment to sharing knowledge and driving industry advancements. Through deeper dive discussions, use cases, and real-world outcomes, CORO aims to showcase the tangible benefits of their solutions.
Stay Tuned for Chapter Two
With an exciting chapter ahead, listeners are encouraged to follow CORO's journey and explore the transformative impact of their cybersecurity solutions. Whether in person at events like the RSA Conference or through online resources, the opportunity to connect with Dror Liwer and the CORO team remains open for all interested parties.
Learn more about CORO: https://itspm.ag/coronet-30de
Note: This story contains promotional content. Learn more.
Guest: Dror Liwer, Co-Founder at Coro [@coro_cyber]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/drorliwer/
Resources
Learn more and catch more stories from CORO: https://www.itspmagazine.com/directory/coro
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Unveiling the Cybersecurity Revolution for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) | A Brand Story Conversation From RSA Conference 2024 | A CORO Story with Dror Liwer | On Location Coverage with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli
Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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[00:00:00] Sean Martin: Marco.
[00:00:02] Marco Ciappelli: Sean.
[00:00:03] Sean Martin: We're on our way.
[00:00:05] Marco Ciappelli: We are on our way.
[00:00:05] Sean Martin: We're on our way to some cool innovations. And, uh, I think the, the industry is clamoring, not, not for AI necessarily, but for things that actually help.
[00:00:19] Marco Ciappelli: So we haven't even started. You already said AI. I mean, I'm getting it out of the way. You just don't give me a break with this thing.
[00:00:27] Sean Martin: No, I'm getting it out of the way. I don't know how much we're going to talk about it today, but my point is. Um, in, in real life, uh, organizations are struggling to keep up with the threats and the attacks. And, uh, while there may be some whiz bang stuff out there, I think we need real solutions that tackle every little aspect of the challenges they face from the threats to the operations to everything.
And I have a feeling that our story today with Coro Is going to help with some of that, if not a lot of it. So I'm thrilled to have, uh, Dror on, uh, Coro uh, good to see you. Good to have you on. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:10] Dror Liwer | CORO: Great. Uh, thanks for having me, uh, Sean Marco.
[00:01:13] Sean Martin: Yep. It's good. Good to have you on. And, uh, I'm excited to get, get this origin story about, uh, how the company was founded and what, uh, what value it brings to the, to the market and to your customers. Um, before we do that, though, a little bit about you.
[00:01:28] Dror Liwer | CORO: I'm Dror. I'm one of the co founders, uh, here at Coro. Uh, originally I was, uh, uh, the, uh, CIO of the Israeli military police after being discharged. Started, uh, different companies ended up, uh, starting this company with, uh, three partners in 2014. So we're about to celebrate our 10th anniversary.
[00:01:57] Marco Ciappelli: Very nice.
Happy birthday. Exciting. Thank you.
[00:02:00] Dror Liwer | CORO: Yeah, it's really exciting, especially considering. The road we've traveled and where we are today.
[00:02:06] Marco Ciappelli: Yeah, definitely a big milestone for today's market. Uh, so I love origin story. I mean, I, the best story is the beginning. Either we talk about superheroes or we talk about story with a moral for kids or, you know, technology need good stories.
So I would love for you to tell me the why behind the CORO Company.
[00:02:29] Dror Liwer | CORO: Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So when, uh, We started the company, we realized that there was a massive deficiency in the market where a hundred percent of the cybersecurity companies are either focused on the enterprise or the consumer, but the majority of the economy is actually in between.
So 63 percent of the GDP in the U S is. Produced by mid market companies and small businesses. Meanwhile, they're completely overlooked by the entire industry. So what is happening in, uh, the real world is. Enterprise players are trying to push an enterprise product down a mid market company's throat, or a consumer player is trying to shove a consumer product down an SMB's throat.
And we felt that, first of all, that just leaves a huge swath of the economy completely unprotected for real. And secondly, we felt that we should be the ones to come in and change the rules of the game. And we have. Um, and that's really how the company started. And that is actually why we've been growing like we have.
We've been growing 300 percent year over year for the last five years straight. Uh, we've raised just over 280 million in funding, uh, over the last, uh, three years. And the main reason is because we're solving a problem. Nobody else cares about. It's not that, uh, they couldn't solve it. It's they just don't care.
[00:04:10] Sean Martin: Yeah, and it's interesting. I'm, I have a lot of, uh, background in what you just described doing, sadly, doing just that. Trying to force one or the other ends into the middle. And, um, we'll, we'll get to the tech part of it in a minute. But I think there's a bigger picture here as well that I want you to maybe touch on, which is I want you There's a sales process.
There's how you price it. It's how you support this space. It's, uh, yeah, I mean, it's the whole operations. Do they have the right staff to support the, the solution? So talk to me a bit, a bit about this space in the middle of the mid market. Yeah. Some of the things they need that they're not being served through some of the other players.
[00:04:57] Dror Liwer | CORO: Yeah. So, so you touched on a couple of the key things when we sat around the, uh, the design table. And said, okay, so why not sell an enterprise product into the mid market? We realized that there are three things in the mid market and in small businesses that are very, very different fundamentally than a large enterprise.
One, normally they will not have a dedicated cybersecurity team. It's IT, If they even have an IT team, many, many times they outsource IT completely. Um, but, uh, if they have an IT team, the IT team is, uh, the organization that actually supports cybersecurity in addition to everything else they have to deal with as an IT team.
That's one. The second thing is, um, they have a very limited budget. So they play what we call threat roulette. They know that they only have this much budget. And they basically place bets on what threats they think are going to be, uh, the most vulnerable for them, knowing that they're leaving other areas of, uh, the security landscape or the threat, um, the threat landscape open.
Um, and three, it's all about complexity. So the cybersecurity industry has done a great job of convincing everyone that it's. Super complex and you need very specialized tools for very different threat vectors or threat actors or anything of that sort. And it's a very self serving way of looking at cybersecurity because that way you and the analysts and everybody plays this in this pool of specialty.
What that generates is an enormous amount of complexity. And for a mid market company That is, uh, or a small business that are struggling to stay afloat business wise. It's so difficult for them to now deal with this complexity. So our entire approach was solving for these three things. One, instead of having numerous different products, that you need to buy, install, maintain, configure, um, and make sure that they work together and don't contradict each other and so on and so on.
It's one platform. It's the, what we call the power of one. It's one platform that has one dashboard, one pane of glass that you work through and one endpoint agent that covers everything that you would need, starting from Uh, endpoint protection and, and, uh, DLP at the endpoint and, and security posture of the device and MDM One endpoint agent, one dashboard, one platform, and that's all you need to know and there's 14 different modules that you can turn on and off.
as your needs change over time.
[00:08:02] Marco Ciappelli: That's exactly what I was like when I looked at your website and your model. And I was like, I wish I could have this module approach to almost everything I own, right? Because you buy this thing and it comes with the old bundle. And I'm like, I don't need maybe 80 percent of that stuff.
So I really like that approach. Tell me a little bit more about that.
[00:08:25] Dror Liwer | CORO: So, so one of the things that we've discovered was a Um, that. The mid market in general, because they don't have the staff, they just want to know that they're protected, right? And in order to be protected, they're being told that there is a list of things that they need to worry about, whether it's, uh, endpoint protection or, uh, data governance or cloud protection, or of course, email user protection, uh, normal abnormal behavior protection.
All of these different things, uh, what we've done was we created a module for each one of those areas, and we allow them to simply turn on and off on demand what it is that they want to protect. Um, a great example, for example, is data governance. When you look at data governance today, uh, a lot of this is driven by government regulations or insurance regulations, uh, where A company needs to have data governance in order to comply either with government regulations or to be able to get cyber insurance.
What we've done, it's really normally super complex with scripting and dictionaries and classifications and all that. We took all of that away and we basically asked the customer, do you want data governance? What data do you want to govern? And where do you want it governed? And once you define these three things, whether it's on the endpoint, in the cloud, in your email, in storage, doesn't matter.
You just turn it on and it just happens magically. You don't need to configure it. You don't need to, uh, write scripts, uh, that identify what kind of data you need governed. Excuse me. So, uh, going back to the original statement I made, It's not only about consolidation and making it a power of one. It's also making it very simple to digest because my customer, the mid market and the small businesses.
Don't have the time to deal with the complexity of the traditional cybersecurity tiered multi product, multi vendor concepts at all. But Sean, you touched on something else earlier, uh, which was also around affordability. So as I said before, one of the things that we came to the table with was, we looked at this and we said, what is most difficult?
And one of the things was, Pricing, because when you look at, uh, a mid market company, for example, as I said before, they have a very limited budget and now they need to take this budget and place it on specific threads. And that's not how the world works anymore, because attackers don't go this way anymore.
They go laterally, they come in from all different directions at the same time. So by you protecting a specific area, yeah, you're protecting that area, but you're not protecting the business. We took it from the perspective of how do we protect the business, that small business, that mid market company, that school, uh, that local municipality, We look at them as an organization and how do we cover them from all directions and make sure that they don't need, we take away that headache from them.
We become cybersecurity around, uh, the, the entire perimeter. Everything that they need in, in this one platform and bring it to a point where they can actually afford it. So the modules, for example, each one of the modules is 3 per user per month, which is very reasonable. If you buy all our modules, An entire package, it's anywhere between 15 to 18 per user per month.
That's it. To put things in perspective, if you bought all these modules from another vendor, it would end up being anywhere between 45 to 115 per user per month. And at that number, a mid market company, or definitely a small business, simply can't afford it. At 15 a month, you know, if they have a hundred employees, that's 1, 500 to protect the entire company.
That's something people put on their credit card. So we've taken away all of the barriers to complexity, uh, and the cost. And, uh, and one more thing that we've done was because they have a very small team, And because my customers are, even the team that they have is inundated with other stuff that they need to work on, because they're the IT organization, they're not a dedicated cybersecurity organization.
We've automated almost all of the cybersecurity tasks. So almost all the remediation, all, all of the detection and all of the remediation is done automatically. There's no human involvement. So we remove the workload from humans. So all three issues that these guys are facing, we've taken away.
[00:13:29] Marco Ciappelli: Do you have bundles for specific kind of business?
Because I mean, I come from a family of very small business. So I, you know, this wasn't, this was before the internet. That was my grandfather. But, but I can see him kind of like projecting in this world and be like, yeah, okay. This is affordable, but I still don't know. Don't know what I need. So
[00:13:52] Dror Liwer | CORO: yeah, yeah, so I think so.
First of all, yes, we have Bundles, we call them suites that you can buy. So there is an email protection suite There is an access protection suite There is a an endpoint protection suite and then you can buy each module on its own You can buy each one of those suites or you can buy what we call the complete Uh, the core complete protection, which is all of the modules, as I said, for, uh, 15, uh, between 15 and 18 per user per month.
And then you're completely protected. Uh, we also are very active in very specific verticals, such as education and automotive. And for them, we also tailored some of our offering to make it more approachable. So for example, for education, um, we have a model where. Uh, we're helping them secure their staff, but also their students.
Uh, which is very interesting because a lot of times they share the same infrastructure. So if you secure the staff really, really well, but a student comes in with their iPad or, or with their Mac book or whatever, and they do something silly, they might actually create damage for the entire school. So we have a model where we help them protect the staff as well as the students in specifically in education, uh, bringing up, uh, basically responding to what you've asked about.
Specific verticals or specific, uh, uh, areas, uh, from a bundling perspective.
[00:15:27] Sean Martin: So talk to me about, and I presume that's general education and higher education universities and things like that as well.
[00:15:34] Dror Liwer | CORO: It's a K through 12 universities, vocational, every, everything. We, we think
[00:15:41] Sean Martin: they all need to help.
[00:15:42] Dror Liwer | CORO: And if you look at the news, education has been hit probably the hardest in 2023.
With schools shutting down, uh, school districts shutting down because of cyber attacks, uh, four years ago, you've never heard that, uh, education wasn't a target. It became a target, very active target in the last couple of years. So especially in 2023, we've had some terrible stories about schools shutting down.
We have this, uh, Lincoln University in, in, uh, uh, Illinois shut down, period. Closed down. And, and sent all the students home. And this is a historic university that has been, a historic college. I'm sorry. That has been around since the 1800s. And because of a cyber attack, they were destroyed. And, uh, so it breaks my heart to hear these kinds of stories because had we been there?
They would have been still in action. They would have been still alive, you know? So, so for us, it's really a passion mission. It's not just a business. We are protecting the backbone of. Uh, the economy and the education, the people that really need us the most.
Sorry about that.
[00:17:03] Sean Martin: It's all good. The world brings you, they're already excited.
So I want to, I want to take you to the very first step of this journey for your customers, because you automate a lot of stuff in terms of management, maintenance, response, all of that. Uh, clearly affordable, organized and packaged in ways that, that makes it approachable and easy to consume from that perspective.
Um, presumably some information to help them kind of navigate that, but there's still the, I, I need help just to figure out what is my scope, what is my exposure, how should I take the first steps, because I may not be able to go the full, the full suite to start. Yeah. I might need to start small because my team is small.
So how, how do you work with organizations that need that, that very first step support either directly or, or, or through partners in the channel or however, however you go?
[00:18:08] Dror Liwer | CORO: So, so first of all, um, a lot of our business comes from the channel. So we are very, very channel centric and very friendly to the channel.
Uh, and about right now, about 72 percent of our, uh, business comes. From our partners. So we love them and we treat them like royalty that they are. Um, so one of the things that we do is we help them both from an education perspective, the onboarding process. For partner, for example, has a lot of education that we provide completely for free as part of the package of helping them identify what are the things that they need to do with their customers.
If it's a direct customer. Um, so we do an onboarding with them as well, in which we, uh, figure out exactly what they need and help them. Get that exact match of what they need, uh, to in in their own landscape. But in addition to that, we have what we call modular. Uh, managed services. So we have a managed service offering that if a customer or partner don't really know how to operate or don't want to operate cybersecurity, we can operate this on their behalf.
Uh, so we have a managed
[00:19:28] Sean Martin: detection response, for example, MDR.
[00:19:30] Dror Liwer | CORO: Exactly. Exactly. So it's a managed service that, uh, runs, uh, that is us based, um, and can respond to events. And, uh, requirements and, uh, make sure that, um, the partner or the direct customer are protected in the right way that they need to be.
[00:19:56] Sean Martin: Well, it sounds good to me, Roar. And, uh, I'm excited to see you in, uh, San Francisco, you're, you're going to many events this year, but, uh, most of, most, uh, imminent one is RSA conference. And we'll see you there. And I know you're going to, you're going to be chatting with, uh, customers and partners and, and, uh, investors and all, all kinds of folks too.
Continue your journey to help this very important space. And I'm, I'm really excited for our deeper dive chat. We're going to get into, uh, I'm looking forward to it on Thursday. Uh, we, we scratched the surface on the tech during our broadcast out of the conversation, we're going to get into. How does this, how does this fit into the bigger IT program?
How do teams with and without security, um, work with you and, and, and solve some of the problems we're going to get some use cases, some stories from you. Um, the outcomes, right? What's, what's the benefit of, of working with Coro? Uh, so I'm really excited for that. We're going to do that on Thursday. And, uh, That's in the broadcast alley there in the afternoon on Thursday.
So I'm super excited for that and I encourage everybody to stay tuned for that episode. It's gonna be fun. I'm looking forward to meeting you in person there.
[00:21:12] Marco Ciappelli: And the reason why we do this is that we could, we are aware that no, not everybody is gonna be in San Francisco. It will be a mess if everybody in the world That's right, be in San Francisco.
But we're gonna go there. We're gonna have the conversation, the matter. And hopefully you can get the benefit of this knowledge that we're going to share with you all of you by going there and meeting people like Dror and many more. So you guys stay tuned.
[00:21:38] Sean Martin: Coro's there on behalf of the mid market.
Exactly.
[00:21:41] Marco Ciappelli: We are. Representing. Very, very cool. Uh, exciting. And, uh, it's about to happen. So safe travel, everybody. And everybody else listening, stay tuned for chapter two of, uh, Coro.
[00:21:55] Dror Liwer | CORO: Yes, thank you very much Sean and Marco for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:21:59] Sean Martin: Absolutely. And, uh, those listening and watching, um, you don't have to wait for the next conversation.
Go ahead to coro. net and, uh, connect with the team there. And if you happen to be in San Francisco, come with questions, look, come with, uh, come with an eye for a solution from, uh, from drawer and team. All right. Thank you everybody. Stay tuned. We'll, more to come from Coro and, uh, ITSB magazine.