IntelliGO Acquired by ActZero

It’s not often we get to make an announcement quite this exciting: IntelliGO Networks has been acquired by ActZero, a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence company! You can check out the press release here.

This partnership means incredible things for our clients, partners, and employees! In this blog post, we’ll discuss how the acquisition might impact you, the relationship between machine learning and Managed Detection and Response, and how this impacts the cybersecurity business at large. First, a few key details about the acquisition:

• We will retain our name, IntelliGO Networks Inc., and remain independently operated.
• Our president, leaders, and rest of the team are thrilled to be staying on, to continue to deliver world-class cybersecurity!
• Our offering has not changed — we still offer Managed Detection and Response, Incident Response, and Virtual CISO services for the mid-market enterprise.
• We will benefit from significant financial investment to continue to hire developers and cybersecurity thought leaders to disrupt the cybersecurity landscape.
• We gain the added benefits of ActZero’s highly experienced team, hailing from both Silicon Valley start-ups and global enterprises including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Akamai, and Ernst & Young!
• The ActZero team members are experts in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, which has profound applications within cybersecurity and will both differentiate IntelliGO’s MDR offering and disrupt the MDR and MSSP markets.

Why Does Machine Learning Matter for MDR?

Central to “pure-play” MDR technology is the ingestion of data – logs from endpoints, network technology, security technology, and more. Machine learning allows us to continuously improve in identifying new factors that indicate compromise earlier on, because it can process more data than a human can, and it can do so faster. It’s great at uncovering patterns within potentially relevant indicators.

Of course, that also means improved performance and results, such as reduced MTTD; yielding greater reduction of risk for our clients. And, while our clients already don’t experience false positives, it ensures our threat hunters are spending their time on more fruitful investigations, improving the number of threats we detect and contain.

Scalability: Better Service, More Efficiently, as we Grow

Being able to ingest and process more data means we can extract greater insight from the logs we already collect and collect logs from additional sources as they become relevant. So, for IntelliGO, this means our ability to scale with our clients increases, serving a greater volume of endpoints and organizations.. This matters when it comes to network effects — the more data we see, the better our technology can detect patterns and learn from it. And, over time, we can scale through technological advancements that drive efficiency and efficacy, without needing as many analysts. This means we’ll continue to deliver cutting-edge service at a fraction of the cost it would take our competitors.

The integration of machine learning will also mean new use-cases for our platform, broadening the list of threats we can detect and prevent, and giving us new ways to respond to them. There are benefits to our existing mid-market clients (such as finding even more threats that other solutions don’t), but also for our enterprise clients that already have a SOC – but not a machine learning-enabled one.

What Does Machine Learning Not Mean?

While machine learning will unlock benefits for our clients described above (improved MTTD, new features, and risk reduction), it’s not a panacea—as some of the literature about it might lead you to believe. We wanted to address a few common misconceptions about the integration of machine learning into our development roadmap:

• We are not replacing threat hunters with software – we’re augmenting their capabilities to improve detection accuracy, efficiency, and ability to deliver positive outcomes for our clients.!
• Machine learning doesn’t mean “just automation.” While machine learning will help to automate certain functions our threat hunters are doing manually now – queries we write, data we sift-through, response actions we take – it also allows for reaction to inputs faster than any human eye (no matter how many of them) can react.

The synergy afforded by the combination of expert Threat Hunters and rules/use cases within our Platform are what make our MDR service so effective. See our post on “Why Machine Learning Won’t Replace Human Threat Hunters” from last year. IntelliGO had already invested heavily into integrating machine learning into our platform; ActZero’s support will just help us reach these goals faster, and more effectively.

Grand Vision

One critical criterion for this match was where our teams wanted to take this business, and what higher-order purpose we would serve on this journey together. Our team shares an ambitious vision for building the future of cybersecurity: Stop Cyber Threats, Protect the World. By using innovative technology to disrupt the status quo, we can have a meaningful impact, helping to protect business from the evolving cybersecurity threat. While our focus remains on small to mid-sized enterprises, our new goals are to be able to offer our protection to an even broader selection of organizations around the globe.

What should clients expect next?

Expect the same high-value service you would from your consummate security professionals, until we start to reap the benefits described above!

What about our partners?

Again, expect the same great service for your clients, and stellar engagements with our sales and sales engineering teams. Further down the line, our partners should also expect to see new offerings, and greater collaboration from us as we bring them to market together.

We want to thank all our clients, partners, employees, and everybody else who helped make this possible.

If you would like to hear more about the exciting developments at IntelliGO, including analysis of new threats, business implications, and risk reduction efforts, you can subscribe to our blog here. For more forward-looking cybersecurity content, check out our 2020 Cybersecurity Predictions and Business Implications whitepaper.