Local information security firm Performanta has plans to grow its business locally, regionally and internationally.
In SA, the Midrand-headquartered firm believes it can tap into the managed services market with a keen focus on SMEs, while internationally, the company has set its sights on expanding to lucrative markets such as the US.
This was revealed by Martin Springer, chief operations officer of Performanta, in an interview with ITWeb.
The interview followed UK’s Beech Tree Private Equity’s March announcement that it is making a “significant investment” in Performanta.
Beech Tree will support Performanta’s plans to make strategic acquisitions in core markets to expand the group, accelerate focus on enterprise customers and the channel, and further invest in its products.
Inadequate budgets
According to Springer, there are many opportunities in the local market, especially in the SME sector, as these organisations do not typically have the people or budget to establish their own cyber security teams.
“Managed services are, therefore, a very viable option for them because logically, it does not make sense to invest in people and technology due to the challenge in managing it all – it’s far easier to rather outsource.”
Springer explains this also makes sense from a commercial perspective, as businesses should ideally seek to have a partner that looks end-to-end at their broad operating environment and gives professional advice and service as it is a complex and overlapping ecosystem.
“What we are currently seeing is that a lot of businesses don’t have some of the basics in place, so there is a big opportunity to help tidy up their cyber security estate and then help them to expand on that. In addition, where businesses have found themselves compromised, we have been able to assist to remediate and help get things back on course.”
To expand the business in SA, Springer says with the recent acquisition of Identity Experts, a Microsoft Gold Security Partner, as well as identity and access management specialist consultancy, and Performanta’s drive for more automated, ready-made managed services, the company anticipates good growth in the local market.
“Aside from this, our managed services for the rest of world will run mainly from South Africa and will be headed from here as well, which will allow us to expand our revenue streams and invest back into our local service offerings.
“In addition, we will expand on our incident response offering and our consulting practice. As above, with far more focus due to anticipated risk, we see no shortage of opportunity to assist the local market.”
On the global front, Springer says: “We are looking to put concerted effort and investment into growing the business in the US market once we have a firm foothold in our existing markets.”
African footprint
In Africa, he notes Performanta currently services and has serviced clients in more than 13 African countries to date and will continue to do so, while adding to the service portfolio of these clients and looking to expand with their footprints into Africa.
“We are also exploring a channel model in Africa. As our service COE [centre of excellence] will be in South Africa, we will be servicing other geographies from South Africa, and Africa is no different.”
While the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an increase in cyber threats as companies ramped up digital transformation amid increased remote working and learning, Springer says: “It’s hard to say if there was a dramatic increase in spend specifically due to COVID-19, but we certainly saw more security breaches – which resulted in more demand for technology and services.”
He believes the main factor for consideration going forward is the need for businesses to better protect endpoints, as these are now no longer necessarily under the protection of corporate networks.
“COVID-19, remote working and cloud migration have all played a role in creating a requirement to pay far greater attention to the basics and make sure cyber security is considered in businesses’ programmes. It’s hard to perfectly correlate but there has definitely been a rise in criminal cyber activity over the past year,” he concludes.
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