Partner Newsletter November 2023

Dear

November turned out to be a special month for the Guardian360 team as we had our annual meetup of our global members in our Utrecht office. It was great fun to have our mostly fully remote working team in one place working and bonding. During the week we met with some of our premium partners, hosted several meetings and training sessions, and worked on new Lighthouse features.

During the SaaS Summit Benelux, Reindert Doorn and I co-hosted a round table from PKIsigning. Despite the fact that information security is considered to be important for many SaaS companies, many only pay attention once customers ask for it. Fortunately, with NIS2 and increasing executive responsibility for information security, security by design is increasingly becoming the new norm. It was good to get the stage before the 500 attendees at the summit!

Last month we introduced we’re working on a mobile app. This month you can find out about how we want to apply gamification and machine learning to our platform. You will also receive an update regarding our efforts to keep our platform as scalable and available as possible.

An exciting development is that we have signed Prianto GmbH as distributor in the DACH region. Please refer to the part of the newsletter that introduces this appointment.

This month we collaborated with 8 other Dutch partners to host an event in Munich for International Business Cybersecurity Germany. It turned out to be a great success! This was evident by the volume of German organisations who participated in the key notes and break outs. We presented a breakout with The Bristol Group Deutschland which you can read more about this in this newsletter.

If you haven’t signed up for our online talk show in December yet, please do that asap. We’re very much looking forward to hosting our first talk show and, it seems that we are not alone in this. We already have more signups than expected. If you’re not able to join on 13 December, please sign up anyway, a link to the recording will be sent to you afterwards.

This month we added the "Normenkader Digitaal Veilig Funderend Onderwijs (IBP FO)" norm to our compliancy module to allow educational organisations in the Netherlands to gain insights in deviations from this norm as well.

This is a final reminder that the Global Pricelist, effective from 1 January 2024, has been published on the Partner Portal. If there are still orders you would like to place or renew at the 2023 rates, please contact us right away. Orders and renewals processed before 31 December 2023 will have 2023 pricing for the whole purchase order duration.

I wish you all the best for the last month of the year. Good luck with achieving your annual goals!

On behalf of the Guardian360 team,

Jan Martijn Broekhof

CEO (Founder) / Geschäftsführer (Gründer)

Lighthouse update

While we often speak about features or updates that seem obvious to our users, not enough mention is made of the stellar work our SRE team does under the hood to ensure that our platform is stable, available, and current with the latest technology.
Our team has done a mammoth amount of work this year in what we have been calling our cloud migration project. But while we call it that internally, the work that has been done offers so much more and builds a solid foundation for what is coming in the next year.

These are the doors that have opened because of their substantial effort:

Observability – While this was limited due to the tech stack we had previously, we will now have insights into about everything in our infrastructure.

Insights and Metrics – Observability means that we can provide better insights and metrics to our clients about their internal networks, trends and so much more. This allows us to put more control in the hands of our users.

Machine Learning – All the new data we have access to allows us to employ an interactive machine learning algorithm to issues to better prioritise issues. We are already implementing this. We will not only be prioritising, but grouping issues so that multiple issues can be solved with one solution.

More Accuracy – because of all the above we no longer need to rely only on risk levels provided by our scanners but can tailor risks to be specific to our clients' needs based on the information that is now available.

Less Toil – because we are a small team it is essential for us to eliminate repetitive tasks so that we can be more focused and efficient in what we do. Better and more accurate insights will make our user’s jobs easier as we decrease the toil their daily chores.

More availability – observability and availability go hand in hand. Because we have better insights, we are better to detect failure before it comes to a critical level. It is important to us that we detect issues before we are informed by partners.

The massive effort our team has put into reliability is often unseen, but this is the foundation of what makes our product a true contender in the market. It would be no good if we had the pretty makeup but without substance below the surface.

While we are extremely excited about the much talked about shiny features we are delivering in the future, they would not work if the infrastructure to carry them was not in place.

We’re proud of what we achieved under the hood to make our platform as scalable and reliable as possible!

Exploring Gamification

According to Wikipedia “Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users.”
Over the last 3 months our UX intern, Axel, has worked diligently to analyze Lighthouse for ways to improve our user experience with a special focus on Gamification strategies. Here are some ideas we are exploring:

Personalization. Lighthouse is a tool, and like all good tools, it should be tailored to fit a user's needs. Giving users the freedom to shape their own work environment within Lighthouse will increase efficiency, allow users to enter the flow state more easily, and eliminate workplace discomfort.

Prioritizing. No one likes keeping track of a million things, games have been perfecting this art for the last decade, so there is no reason we can’t do the same. We want to give users more ways to define what’s important to them so we can bring their most relevant issues to light, thereby saving valuable time and energy to be spent elsewhere.

Learn by playing. Practical experience through interaction is a much more efficient way of learning than gaining book knowledge on its own. At Guardian360 we want to make it easy for anyone to easily onboard our platform without getting lost in a new system that may seem foreign to them. That is why we are looking into ways for users to onboard themselves so that our partners can help them with more complicated problems. This will improve our user’s experience by eliminating time wasters.

This is by no means the complete list we are exploring, but if you want to help us with our research then please fill out the questionnaire or send an email to: Axel Nieuwland (a.nieuwland@guardian360.nl) with your Lighthouse experiences, both good and bad

Probe Scan Report

In the past few months, we received a ticket from one of our partners who requested information regarding the length of time that scans run. We attended to this request by creating an email report which eventually evolved into a more feature rich solution.

The report is sent by email daily for whoever opts in and offers the following metrics:

Names of different probes
Status
Number of CPU’s and the amount of RAM
Scan Duration
Scan Lead Time
Uncompleted Scans
Completed Jobs

The purpose of this is to give feedback into how long scans are running and to be alerted that probe resources may need attention.

If you would like to opt into this report, simply select a designated contact and set the switch on the contact person’s detail page.

Probes are listed per organisation and partners will get a single report of all customers.

Prianto appointed distributor in the DACH region

Guardian360 and Prianto have signed a distribution agreement to distribute Guardian360 services in the DACH region. The successful collaboration during this year's IT-SA trade show in Nuremberg provided the final confirmation that both organisations can add extensive value in helping businesses in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to become in control of information security. Prianto’s rapid growth as an organisation means that other countries are also within our reach.

We look forward to a commercially successful collaboration which will not only be meaningful, but enjoyable as well.

The picture shows William Geens (CEO Prianto GmbH) and Jan Martijn Broekhof (CEO Guardian360) just after Jan Martijn handed a whole cheese to William as a present to celebrate the signing of the agreement.

Secure. Comply. Conquer.

Are you active as a CEO, DGA, CISO, Information Security Manager, CTO, IT manager, auditor or otherwise involved in the compliance and audit process of an organisation in the financial sector or pension fund? Then don't miss this talk show!

Do you agree? In finance, compliancy is more than regulation; it is crucial to your corporate DNA. Having your affairs in order is "permission to play". High interconnectedness of service providers amplifies the risks of non-compliancy!

Guardian360 presents a talk show aimed at the Dutch and Belgium finance sector. Our speakers will delve deeper into the current cyber threat landscape in the financial sector and will discuss how to be compliant and resilient. Our experts, together with leading influencers from the finance and security world, will share interesting practical insights, lessons-learned and solutions to benchmark and optimise your own IT security.

Do you recognise yourself in the following 5 concerns and challenges?
Our boardroom members are not successful in making the right IT decisions.
IT and information security is seen as a cost, not a business driver.
Without sound IT security, we will have no business within 10 years.
How do I navigate through the forest of laws and regulations including NIS, GDPR and DORA, with compliancy and business value as my guide.
How to make compliancy a business strategy, rather than a tick box exercise.

PIB Germany Event: Sharing Knowledge and Enhancing Collaboration in Cybersecurity

On 14 November, the Partners for International Business (PIB) Programme Germany organised an event (https://securitydelta.nl/events/hsd-events/collaboration-in-cybersecurity-seminar-the-most-important-tasks-for-business-management-2023-11-14) in München: “Zusammenarbeit in der Cybersicherheit: Die wichtigsten Aufgaben für die Unternehmensführung”. The aim of the event was to bring together Dutch and German organisations and to stimulate collaboration and exchanges of knowledge in the field of cybersecurity. At the same time, C-suite decision-makers were able to gain relevant insights into the most important cybersecurity areas and developments.

Christoph Weinandt (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cweinandt/) from The Bristol Group Deutschland (https://www.bristol.de) and Jan Martijn hosted a break-out session about bridging the gap between compliance and information security. Both of us felt energised with the substance and outcome of this event.