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Going beyond the basics to keep organizations truly cyber secure

Ron Schlecht is the founder and managing partner of BTB Security, an information security company headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, PA, with offices in Chicago, IL, and Austin, TX. Through a comprehensive approach that goes beyond the basics—the meaning behind the company’s namesake acronym—BTB Security helps clients detect emerging cyber threats, protect sensitive data, and defeat cyber criminals. The firm serves a wide range of industries—including financial services, education, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and more—as well as government clients. BTB Security is listed on the Inc. 5000, where it has been named one of the nation’s top security companies (#23).

EDWIN WARFIELD: You mentioned BTB Security’s RADAR, or Rapid Advanced Detection And Response platform. Tell us more about that and how it works. Do you consider it a product or a service?

RON SCHLECHT: The reason that RADAR is what it is—going back to when we started to put it together: there are three big challenges that folks have in doing monitoring and responding to security incidents. They either don't have the tools, or they have the right tools and it's misconfigured; or they don't have the people to be able to watch it and actually respond to it. Talking about that, it's not really a product, and I don't think it could ever be a standalone product. For us, in the methodology that we use, is the fact that you can have a great platform; you can have great processes behind it to ensure that it's configured correctly and it’s doing what it needs to be doing; you can even—to throw a couple of buzzwords around here—you can even have great artificial intelligence or machine learning built into that platform, and it can do so much for you; but you still need that human factor to be able to look over things to make sure that you're catching the right things and responding to them appropriately.

So, it could be spun out as a product. And, conversely, somebody could come along and defeat it. We don't think that you're going to have the same response and really the same outcome if you're using a product as opposed to a service, because there's still that human element behind it. A product can't respond to a security incident. It can do its best but there's still going to be things that need to be coordinated on the backend, and that's why they're all tightly coupled together.

Q. Walk us through growing the company in a constantly changing technology environment. What industries do you sell to? What elements of the business do you most heavily invest in?

A. We talk about the expertise of our analysts, and what they bring to the table and how we recruit them and retain them, and continue to educate them on an ongoing basis, just as much when we talk about our platform as we do just the technology involved.

In industries, we’re very heavily represented in financial services. The second being healthcare in terms of the number of clients and the amount of revenue that we pull in. From there, we jump down into resorts and entertainment. Having a background in working for a casino operator—that's given me a little bit of levity to talk to some of the operators out there and talk about what they're doing in security and how they're doing it. Beyond that, we do have some representation in the auto manufacturing industry, believe it or not. As the auto manufacturers have moved into using connected vehicles as part of their strategy, we've been involved in architecting and helping people assess the technology around that, and safeguarding some of the information that goes back and forth between that car, the person, and the auto manufacturer.

But, as far as case studies, I can say that the most success that we've had is with the folks where we've been able to help them put a program in place, to give them a strategy in going forward—really put them in a better place to proactively make sure that they're doing the right things, not only for their technical infrastructure but to give them some business differentiators in what they're doing. We do a lot of the monitoring for folks, and for those folks, we've never had anybody experience a breach. They've all had security incidents, but luckily we've been able to catch it and eradicate it and respond effectively, so those folks are very, very happy. For us, those are the type of companies that turn into references, and they're very easy references to prospective clients. To be able to give that information to somebody and say, “here, talk to five of our clients that have enjoyed this service for the past three years,” and to get nothing but glowing reactions back from all of those clients across the board is a testament to what we do and how we do it.

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) is one of the world's leading commercial real estate advisory firms. Together with London-based partner Knight Frank and independently-owned offices, NKF's 15,000 professionals operate from more than 400 offices in established and emerging property markets on six continents.

With roots dating back to 1929, NKF's strong foundation makes it one of the most trusted names in commercial real estate. NKF's full-service platform comprises BGC's real estate services segment, offering commercial real estate tenants, landlords, investors and developers a wide range of services including leasing; capital markets services, including investment sales, debt placement, appraisal, and valuation services; commercial mortgage brokerage services; as well as corporate advisory services, consulting, project and development management, and property and corporate facilities management services. For further information, visit www.ngkf.com.

NKF is a part of BGC Partners, Inc., a leading global brokerage company servicing the financial and real estate markets. BGC's common stock trades on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol (NASDAQ: BGCP). BGC also has an outstanding bond issuance of Senior Notes due June 15, 2042, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol (NYSE: BGCA). BGC Partners is led by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer  Howard W. Lutnick. For more information, please visit www.bgcpartners.com.

Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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