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Sev1Tech: Cloud-Based Network and Application Consulting
Martin Wright, CIOIn an interview with CIO Applications, Martin Wright, CIO of Sev1Tech shares his insights on cybersecurity space and the value addition Sev1Tech brings to its clients.
What propelled the inception of Sev1Tech?
Built by IT operators, Sev1Tech was founded by Robert E. Lohfeld Jr., and started off as a data relocation company. The organization then matured into full life-cycle project management, strategy and acquisition support, cyber security, automation and cloud. Sev1Tech advanced over the years becoming more effective through leveraging technologies that are on premise, off premise or cloud-based.
We ensure our customers know the solutions available to them which will enhance operations and leverage trends in the market to become more competitive. We provide value through "Excellence through the intersection of ‘people, process and technology’" to our customers.
On the challenges in the cybersecurity arena and Sev1Tech's role in mitigating them.
With cyber threats increasing, companies and individuals must make sure they are protected. We provide cloud solutions, both on premise and off premise, within public and private clouds. We think the challenge lies in how organizations can adapt to cloud and secure it. There’s a misconception within the industry that you cannot secure these environments, but our organization has understood the ways to be compliant for both federal governments and large commercials. Being an efficient company, we look at cybersecurity from an operational standpoint and have cultivated Defensive Cyber Operations (DCOs) as a way to detect and respond to any malicious activity within an enterprise’s network. To this point, we have successfully architected our DCO capabilities to be out-of-band (OOB) for a large federal US Airforce program to allow for a more agile environment which moves at the speed of cyber without effecting the mission.
Could you shed some light on the services provided to your customers to overcome these challenges?
Defensive Cyber Operations (DCOs) and Cloud are areas where we push ourselves. With our cost-effective cloud-based network and application monitoring solution, our customers quickly can eradicate problem areas and respond to business users. They can get alerts about malicious activities within their networks, see results in dashboards and scale up to monitor more locations and services. Also, our relationship with Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS ensures we remain agnostic to our customers and build solutions that fit their purpose.
Excellence through intersection of ‘people, process and technology’ is what provides value to our customers
Within the cloud, we try to transform what is to come for our customers be it complex networking, cloud automation, data centre migrations or large program management support.
We have the right subject matter expertise within the organization to cross-walk their entire framework and understand the implications. We accelerate their compliance by doing all their legwork and following the guidance within each framework.
When we reflect on the services we provide to deal with today’s challenges, we are very nimble in reacting to what’s happening today in the market and for our customers.
Considering the solutions, you provide, could you state specific customers that were benefited by it?
One of our customers ‘a large global women’s rights organization-located in 14 different countries–had a seriesof applications and faced problems trying to accelerate the delivery of the application across the entire organization. We leveraged our cloud expertise with Microsoft Azure; combined with local regional capabilities–we established one collocated datacenter within the US that serves as a major peering point and directly connected to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. The creation of a highly available environment within Azure synchronized with the colocation facility allowed the organization to deliver the application more effiectively. Additionally it reduced cost through routing while providing services in areas which were orginally limited. This global distribution accelerated the application in region while being globally available.
It is important to have a good rapport with the employees, could you elaborate on your work culture and what differentiates Sev1Tech?
We recently became an open-books management company, so we share performance details of the organization with every employee. We ensure our employees understand the P&L and balance sheet of the organization. This allows our employees to understand the mechanics of the company and ultimately making them more effective in the support our customers and be more cost-competitive to attract new customers. So, we train all employees to ensure they understand or business processes which plays a critical part in the strategy of the company.
Outside of day to day operations, we provide paid community services days to ensure our employees realize the value of given back. Sev1Tech is strongly committed to giving back to the community and being an exceptional corporate citizen. Our company was founded on the idea that a private company should serve as a good citizen and a positive force within their community. We have an internal Community Service Management Team dedicated to researching and coordinating community service projects. Our company schedules at least one, if not more, service project per month. To encourage all of our employees to participate in community service events, we offer our employees 16hrs of paid time off to participate in community service activities.
What are your recent achievements and the plan for the future?
Software Defined Network (SDN), cloud automation and large commercial facility migrations are recent achievements. We have also made investments in our employees and in cloud services to provide cloud migration and operational solutions. Within Cyber, we are transferring the knowledge to our customers surrounding Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO) and providing cyber solutions as-a-service delivered from our Security and Network operations centers (SOC NOC) directly connected to both on and off-premise cloud environments.
Recently, we opened an office in the Denver Tech Center (DTC) and Colorado Springs to expand our operations and serve both Federal and commercial customers in this region. In Denver, we are focused on large commercial customers in the geospatial, insurance and financial sectors providing cloud services and cyber as-a-service. In Colorado Springs we delivery multiple solutions to the federal markets.
We maintain a healthy balance between our East Coast and West Coast operations and have set a target to grow to 200 million in the next three years. This year alone we are looking to double our commercial revenue, and grow federal revenues by an additional 20-30 percent.
