Summary
Chris Riismandel, owner of Epoch Inc., shares how Blackpoint’s MDR+R solution became a game-changer for his MSP business. With its fast response times, containment capabilities, and integration with other logs and systems, Blackpoint allows the Epoch team to sleep peacefully through the night, knowing their clients are protected from cyberthreats 24/7. Hear how Blackpoint’s containment of incidents like malware-infected downloads and lateral movement attempts prevented potential business-crippling ransomware attacks, and how Blackpoint contributes to Epoch’s success.
Transcript
My name is Chris Riismandel. My company is Epoch Inc. I’m the owner of the company, and we are an MSP/MSSP. We work with typically privately held companies that are typically five to 150 million dollars in revenue.
Our company is relatively unique. We have a very high service level maturity. So we’ve been doing this for about 27 years. So we do everything from help desk to cybersecurity and even some custom application development with our clients.
What challenges led you to seek a partner like Blackpoint?
We’re not a 24/7 shop. I don’t have people that are sitting there waiting for something to happen in the middle of the night when bad things happen.
Really right around the COVID timeframe, we saw the entire landscape shift. We saw all the actors start using new techniques, new attack vectors. The volume completely changed. And I talked to Blackpoint at that point in time, and we knew it was the time.
So we went ahead and we deployed it and we paid for it up front for our clients for several months just to say, “Hey, we know you need this today, a lot is changing.” We knew we needed it, the time was right and we went ahead and deployed it to our clients.
How did Blackpoint earn your business?
I think the main reason we chose Blackpoint as our choice for our MDR or EDR solutions was A, the ability to work with other products, looking at the different types of logs and systems that were coming in. And also, their ability to contain instances and the response time.
So I think what was very unique about Blackpoint, originally, was their capability to respond, contain. And I think that was that was a game changer for us because we never had any countermeasures to deal with these types of things in any of our networks that we were managing. It was kind of a no-brainer.
We looked at a lot of other MDRs, and they’ll let you know that something’s happening. But the timeframe from detection to response could be relatively substantial, and it has to go through a lot of checks and balances, where with Blackpoint, we’re able to give them very specific call to actions if needed, and they implement and execute appropriately.
How has Blackpoint contributed to your business success?
Blackpoint has done a fantastic job in terms of actually allowing us to sleep at night. Ultimately, you know, two in the morning, somebody is not sitting in front of the computer. And Blackpoint has our back in that scenario.
It’s a product that obviously has, you know, increased our revenue in a lot of areas, especially on the cybersecurity side. But I think ultimately the balance is it’s basically the results that we’re getting for our clients.
What does Blackpoint do best?
Blackpoint is fantastic at responding to the initial need. And ultimately that’s where the tires hit the road. It’s great that you tell me I have an incident, but if you can’t do anything about it, it doesn’t do anything for me. And I think ultimately that’s the most important thing from our perspective.
One of our initial instances we actually had was one of our newer clients, and they had an employee that went ahead and downloaded something off their personal email, and it automatically started attacking their corporate Office 365 tenant. Blackpoint was able to contain it right off the bat, basically shut down that machine, contain it, isolate the scenario and remediate it.
We actually had one client that one of their people went ahead and downloaded something called a teaming agreement, which is a basically an agreement they utilize for contracting and working with other businesses. And then it went ahead and did lateral movements from that computer to other computers on their network.
Blackpoint was able to shut down within 11 minutes. So that was a very huge impact. They said if we weren’t there for them, they probably would’ve been out of business, completely ransomed. That was what their expectation was.
What makes Blackpoint unique?
The alerts are always very timely. But I think ultimately what impresses me most about Blackpoint is the people, the culture that exists, and how everyone really ultimately cares about your success as well as, you know, their own.
Blackpoint’s one of our partners that we don’t have to worry about, which is great. And it’s wonderful to watch Blackpoint’s success.