Starting your own company can be an uncomfortable, risky, and uncertain feat. But, for Elana Graham, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of CYDEF, it was a no-brainer. “I’ve worked in the for-profit industry, and I realized I didn’t get a whole lot of joy out of just making money as much as I enjoyed helping people,” said Graham.
Founded in 2018 with a team of eight, CYDEF is a Canadian cybersecurity company looking to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) identify cyberattacks. Graham likes to think of cybersecurity like a house; the windows and doors have locks to keep dangers out, similar to antivirus software, spam filters, and firewalls. But what happens if someone in your home leaves the door unlocked or the garage open? A criminal can walk right through — and the same thing can happen to your organization by just opening an email. That’s why CYDEF is designed to identify all the typical behaviors in their users’ business activities. If anything considered out of the ordinary is detected, the team will launch an investigation.
Without any cybersecurity protocols, SMBs are at risk for longer recovery times from cyber attacks, preventing them from performing business as usual. According to a survey from BullGuard, a global leader in smart-home cybersecurity, almost 40 percent of SMBs lost critical data during cyberattacks. These attacks can also lead to expensive ransom, with another report from Coveware sharing that the average cost of these payments was over $84,000 in 2019. This figure alone can put many small companies out of business.
“The biggest gap from my [perspective] is that smaller organizations don’t have all of the stuff you see out there,” said Graham. “All of the technology that’s available was built for enterprise-grade organizations. It’s built for big companies who have cybersecurity experts on staff and can operate it.” That’s why CYDEF is looking to help smaller businesses secure their companies by designing tools specifically for SMBs who, historically, could not afford cybersecurity.
In 2021, CYDEF joined the Catalyst Cyber Accelerator’s second cohort. Wanting to share their company with a wider audience, the Accelerator offered them the marketing experience to grow their presence and the networking opportunities to learn and gain feedback from larger companies. During their time in the program, Graham explained that they were able to gain a better understanding of where CYDEF sat in their market and hired a digital marketing manager. “We all agreed that we should have joined [the Accelerator] a year and a half earlier. It would have made our startup journey a little easier,” said Graham.
Today, CYDEF’s platform is continuing to help companies of all sizes secure their business online. Earlier this year, CYDEF and OmniSecuritas Technology, a Filipino cybersecurity company, partnered to expand cybersecurity services in the Philippines. This partnership allows OmniSecuritas Technologies to be the Philippines’ premier cybersecurity provider. With their drive to help all companies feel safe doing business online, CYDEF has been recognized as one of the most innovative CyberTech companies in the world by CyberTech100 in 2021 and 2022.
“I remember in the early days we asked some of the experts we had, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you jumping into this little no-name startup?’ And they replied ‘We just want to catch the bad guys.”