The secret to building a robust cybersecurity firm? Hire video gamers.
That’s partly why Assured Enterprises announced last week it was relocating its headquarters to Austin, TX, from northern Virginia. CEO Stephen Soble told me that engineering talent is top of the 3-year-old cybersecurity company’s to-do list.
“They are comfortable thinking outside of the box,” he says of gamers. “They understand the limitations of processes and what someone else has done before, but now want to invent a different way of solving the problem.”
Austin, he adds, is the best place to find those people. (And the University of Texas at Austin has the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy, one of the nation’s only university-based gaming programs.)
Assured Enterprises will keep an office in the Washington, D.C. area—it has customers in the government and defense industry. But it decided to be based “outside of the Beltway, so we would have the teams of people who would better understand needs of dealing with the commercial world,” Soble says.
The company, which plans to hire an additional 150 employees by the end of 2016, provides cybersecurity consulting as well as hardware and software to its customers, starting out with an assessment of vulnerabilities “down to the source code, the 0s and 1s,” he says. Assured Enterprises provides a remediation plan but also provides customers advice on how to prevent future problems from cropping up, Soble adds.
Assured Enterprises has software that it says is tailor-made for different industries, from those that protect credit card readers for retailers to those that secure critical infrastructure in the energy sector.
The company says it can provide such bespoke services while also ensuring its tools are comprehensive. “The vast majority of product companies have end-point solutions that address a single point of pain in the entire network or operational environment,” Soble says. “Our products are geared toward protecting the entire network.”
