Dan Wilbricht has been the general manager of public sector at cybersecurity solutions provider Devo for over a year now, and he’s been busy.
He has built up new teams and processes, and addressed how Devo interacts with government. He’s also building toward anticipated Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program authorization for Devo’s cloud offerings.
All this to support of government’s effort to secure its systems and data.
“Our goal is to find the bad actors or the bad attacks faster, and to remediate those things faster than other people,” he said.
When he joined Devo in August 2021, Wilbricht set out to take Devo public sector to the next level. He set up a channel team, a federal system integrator-focused team, and added key parts to be successful in the federal government, including having a GSA schedule and getting on a Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Approved Products List for the government.
The firm expects to have FedRAMP authorization before the year-end, and Wilbricht is forging ties with cloud service providers in advance of that.
“We have built our relationship out with Amazon Web Services,” he said. “We are now listed on their GovCloud marketplace.”
In addition to FedRAMP, Devo has begun its process for IL4 and IL5 certification for its Defense Department prospects and eventually IL6 for intelligence community prospects by partnering with Second Front Systems. Devo started that certification process to enable the company to offer an Authorization to Operate for DOD/intelligence customers that require the certification for cloud-native data analytics and logging requirements.
These efforts are already paying off in terms of industry recognition. This year, for the first time, Devo made the list of star players on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to Security Information and Event Management.
“As a smaller company, we weren’t ready for this before,” Wilbricht said. “But over the last year, we’ve received two significant investments, taking our valuation from about $800 million to over $2.5 billion today. Now, we are listed as a ‘challenger’ in the upper portion of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, right on the line for the leaders. For a first-time vendor, it’s pretty amazing that we were able to get that high and get that much recognition.”
And Wilbricht expects to do even better next year. Feedback this time around indicated Devo still needed a solution around SOAR ⏤ Security Orchestration, Automation and Response. Two recent acquisitions have now brought that capability in-house.
“If they were to reevaluate us today, we would be in that Leader’s Quadrant,” he said.
With its cyber solutions, Devo helps federal agencies address a range of requirements. Under presidential orders, agencies are supposed to be upping their game around the logging of security incidents, and also working toward a zero trust framework for cybersecurity. Devo helps them tackle both.
The Office of Management and Budget “basically told every civilian agency that they need to collect and save all of their logs for applications, for servers, for people. Everything that you have, you need to now keep on file and make available,” Wilbricht said.
How to do that efficiently and cost-effectively?
Devo delivers a capability “that allows them to take the logs they’re not collecting today and meet that mandate very easily, because it is 10 times faster, we can handle 10 times more the data at half the cost” of other approaches, Wilbricht explained. The company also can help agencies get to zero trust, with tools that empower agencies to find and fix problems faster.
There’s ample demand for cyber solutions in the public sector, not just in federal but also in higher education. That’s where Wilbricht is helping universities address the security challenges that arise in new remote and hybrid working and learning environments.
There’s also a lot of noise in the cyber arena.
“This is a crowded space, and it includes several large companies like Google and Microsoft,” he said.
His strategy for winning visibility is two-fold. First: Document successes. Real-world case studies have proven effective attention-getters in the federal space, he said.
“I’m also constantly supporting the government on my own,” he said. “For example, I’m part of a coalition that’s pushing the Software-as-a-Service market to the DOD at a broader scale, as a cost-effective way to support government’s modernization efforts.”
There’s also a lot of basic block and tackle, ensuring essential marketing activities are ongoing, to bring Devo’s solution set to the attention of federal decision-makers.
“We have to go to the folks who are still using the legacy products and say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to modernize your cybersecurity story, have you considered this?’” he said. “We have to be creative in making sure that we’re reaching out to the decision-makers on these larger programs.”
A 20-plus year veteran of the GovCon space, Wilbricht says it’s his personal passion to support the work of government.
“I came here with the mindset of wanting to give back in some way,” he said. “I want to make sure that the people of the United States are protected, and if we can bring solutions that help our nation do that, I want to be involved. I feel good about what I’m providing to my customers today.”