I hope you made a good start this year! Within Guardian360, 2023 transitioned seamlessly into 2024.
The year kicked off with our first order from Panama. We are excited to support more organisations in South America!
We signed a partner agreement with Dustin (former Centralpoint). Via Dustin we will serve clients in the BeNeLux region as well as the Nordics. We are not yet active in the latter area, we think it is great that we now have the opportunity to support organisations with their information security there as well.
Meanwhile, we have implemented
new production deployments, have you experienced Lighthouse in darkmode yet?
In the last week of 2023, we signed an agreement with Gemeinschaft Fernmelde-Technik eG (GFT), which has given us access to a network of more than 250 managed services providers in the DACH region. We have collaborated with our distributor Prianto to organise our first workshop for partners. We are excited about the huge interest from the German market!
We experience that the labour market is changing, we have now spoken to a few good candidates for our full-stack frontend engineer. There is a possibility that the ideal candidate is among them, but if you know someone who fits the profile, then we would love to hear from you.
We are also still looking for an account manager. If you know someone who fits the profile, let them contact Jeff.
You will find some other updates in this partner newsletter. For example, we will mention the SIDNfonds' contribution to the
"Infosec Agent" that we will be developing in collaboration with Utrecht University. We are preparing an online talk show to demystify NIS2 and, of course, you will read about the Lighthouse update as well as activities where Guardian360 is being featured. On behalf of the Guardian360 team,
Jan Martijn Broekhof
CEO (Founder) / Geschäftsführer
(Gründer)
Lighthouse update
As promised, there were some great UI (User Interface) improvements over the last month. We delivered tables with sticky headers which means one can aways keep context of column rows while scrolling and apply filters without the need to scroll up again.
A surprise addition was the option to switch between light and dark mode, which is a significant improvement for our more technical people who spend long days in front of their screens. Besides looking great, it is also good for reducing the glare. Modes can be switched by toggling the new switch in the header between 3 modes: dark, light and auto. Auto will default to the default settings on your device.
A Renewed Focus on Reporting In 2023 we put in a massive effort to overhaul our systems and deal
with technical debt. This has put us in a position where we will soon be able to handle complex queries that are required by spinning up reports the way we want to.
While we do reports on a small scale, we know that this is somewhere where we can most definitely improve. We have adopted a 3-step approach in how we aim to roll it out:
Improving our export capabilities – by simply adding a date range to the issues table and exporting based on the selected filters we can assist partners to export
their data in a way that makes sense to their business needs. Changes like these are easy and can be done sooner rather than later.
A Generic Reporting Engine – this would allow partners to select their own metrics and spin up tables and charts based on parameters that make sense to them. This is more complex as complex queries will add strain to the database and servers. Nevertheless, we already have a proof of concept in place for this and are waiting for our infrastructure to become more scalable.
A Reporting Wizard – Once we can spin up custom tables and charts, we can implement a wizard that will assist partners to compile their own reports that get triggered by an event or a schedule and can be emailed automatically.
This is quite ambitious, but we have learned that we need to add value in the short term while still providing those big features that make a difference in the lives of our partners and their people.
In the meantime, we will still be improving what we have as we go along.
Final Reminder – Changes to our API by 1 February 2024 If you are using our API then this will affect you. Should you like more information then please read through our previous reminders or click on the link below to read the web version.
In the past couple of months, we have had the opportunity to engage with many of our partners. Some of these partners indicated that they exclusively wish to handle sales without involvement in implementation and follow-up.
Another group expressed proficiency in advising their clients to choose Guardian360 but prefers not to handle the sales themselves. We also talked to partners who mentioned that they are not yet adequately prepared to effectively market our services soon. It was our responsibility to adapt the partner statuses because of this feedback.
Additionally, three new partner statuses have been introduced: reseller, implementation partner and consultancy partner.
Please check with your Partner Success Manager for your current partner status. Feel free to let us know how we can work with you to explore better ways to collaborate so that you can be successful in working with our product.
The Guardian360 Lighthouse platform supports organisations with 50 staff and up. However, we strongly believe that organizations with less than 50 staff as well as freelancers and private individuals also need to become in control of information security and privacy. At the same time, their budget is very limited (if not completely absent).
We are therefore collaborating with graduate software engineering
students from Utrecht University to develop a tool to be used by anyone to gain insights in security, privacy, and hardening issues on workstations. The tool will be open sourced and can be used free of charge.
When the tool is installed on a local machine, users will be able to easily gain insights in security and privacy weaknesses, weak authentication measures, missing security configurations and will get recommendations to better comply with GDPR and NIS2.
The reporting interface as well as the tool itself must be fool-proof, attractive and encourage self-service by non-technical end users. Since Guardian360 has very limited support capabilities, and, because the tool is offered for free, there is no business case to hire additional support staff.
We’re excited SIDNfonds decided to support this project with a grant. The project will start early February, so keep a close eye on our partner newsletter to stay up to date with our
progress.
After the success of the finance talk show in December 2023, we have decided to organise another talk show in March 2024. This time we will discuss
NIS2, but not from the sales tactic of employing fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
We aim to give viewers concrete guidance on what to do when a buyer asks to indicate the extent to which the organisation complies with the NIS2. Like it or not, not only critical and essential businesses will have to deal with the NIS2. Even their suppliers will have to be able to demonstrate that they have their act together!
We will soon send out the invitation to the talk show. If you have any questions you would like to be addressed during the talk show or if you have an interesting insight to share, please contact Jan Martijn bearing in mind he needs time to prepare.
Within Guardian360, we are looking for new colleagues in the roles of full-stack front-end engineer and account manager. If you know someone who fits the profile, make them aware of our vacancies on LinkedIn. We need more staff to be able to support our partners even better, your help is much appreciated!
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