Stephen Osler, co-founder and business development director, Nclose.

Companies look to managed security service providers (MSSPs) for a number of reasons, of which perhaps the main one is access to skills. Many don’t have the necessary skills in-house or, if they do, want their team to concentrate on strategy rather than the day-today management.

“Companies find it difficult to attract and retain security skills, which are in high demand,” says Stephen Osler, Nclose co-founder and Business Development Director. “That’s one reason an MSSP like Nclose would make sense. But it’s one thing to want an MSSP in theory — the real issue is how it delivers its services to you.”

Osler says the typical “bodyshopping” approach followed by South African MSSPs is a recipe for inferior service. (Bodyshopping means that the MSSP deploys a dedicated resource at the client’s premises, which delivers service on its behalf.)

It’s an approach that is anathema to Nclose because it cannot manage the resource directly, and thus has reduced control over the service the client gets. Nclose firmly believes in the power of the collective IP (intellectual property) resident in the team.

“We believe strongly in the value of bringing everybody into the same physical location regularly, so that we can share insights and the senior members of the team can pass on their wisdom to the newer members,” he says. “The team as a collective has a view across the entire client base, which, in turn, increases the collective IP.”

This approach also means that clients are not affected by keyman risk, if an individual leaves or is absent for whatever reason.

As important, regular physical contact with the entire team means that the Nclose culture of adding value and accountability for clients can be communicated and reinforced.

TALENT PIPELINE

Transparency and the willingness to have “robust conversations” within the team and with clients is another hallmark of the Nclose approach. As a result, expectations are able to be managed effectively, and challenges properly communicated. “Physical proximity also breeds a certain competitiveness among a group of engineers, something that makes the workplace more stimulating, and also drives cycles of improvement that benefit clients,” Osler says.

Since its founding some 16 years ago, Nclose has grown to a relatively large team of 130, of which 85% are engineers— a truly impressive talent pool. Because the company has so many engineers, it has the capacity to take on, and train, a steady stream of young engineers. A well-filled talent pipeline is obviously a benefit for clients, but the intake of junior engineers assists in keeping costs low, always an important issue for CIOs and CISOs.

“Clients are always surprised to discover how big our team actually is—the level of value-add we provide is more in line with what one would expect from a smaller company,” Osler says. “We are able to ‘act small’ because of the Nclose approach I’ve described—something we just wouldn’t be able to do if we followed the conventional bodyshop model.”