Cyber disaster recovery firm Fenix24
rolled out its incident response (IR) “battalion,” Argos99 in December last year. This provided organizations
greater visibility into their increasingly distributed data and infrastructure, reduced risks, and accelerated recovery after an incident.
A month later, Fenix24
bought vArmour, an application relationship management software maker, to enhance Argos99 by enabling organizations to reduce their attack surface by mapping relationships and dependencies between applications.
Last week, the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company took another step toward expanding Argos99 capabilities, acquiring
appNovi for its cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA), which maps an organization’s attack surface, inventories its assets, prioritizes risks, and delivers visibility of its environment and threat exposure. AppNovi’s CSMA also enables users to access information easily through an enterprise’s security operations center (SOC).
Complementary Strengths
The CSMA complements what Fenix24 is doing with vArmour’s technology to bolster Argos99’s capabilities, according to Fenix24 co-founder and CEO Mark Grazman.
“Both vArmour and AppNovi are focused on visualizing an entire organizational network, but they each had different areas of strength,” Grazman told MSSP Alert, noting vArmour’s strength with a policy engine that allowed monitoring and visibility for anomalous behaviors in the context of network segmentation and micro-segmentation.
“AppNovi has a more contemporary, SaaS-based, scalable architecture and easier deployment model with more focus on asset identification, resiliency, application dependencies, and API integrations with various security and infrastructure applications,” he said. “Combined, they are giving Fenix24 the ability to work with speed and understand an organizations’ infrastructure, assets, policies, and application dependencies in wartime to accelerate recovery and peacetime to improve operational resilience.”
Cybersecurity is a Battle
Fenix24 is part of
Conversant Group and uses terms like “wartime” and “peacetime” when talking about cybersecurity. They have what they refer to as three IR battalions:
Athena7 for IT security assessments, strategy, and planning,
Grypho5 for ongoing security-based management, and
Argos99 for insights into data, assets, and infrastructure.
Conversant Group was founded in 2009 to help companies build security-based and resilient infrastructure and over the years expanded its services, which eventually included Fenix24 with a focus on breach recovery and cyber resilience.
Fenix24 made headlines last year by
developing recovery scripts that enabled security vendors, MSSPs, and MSPs to remotely help companies recover from the massive IT outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike outage. Until then, affected endpoints remediation needed to be done on site by a technician.
CSMA's Rising Profile
AppNovi’s CSMA is a critical tool for Argos99 at a time when organizations’ IT environments – from infrastructure and assets to data repositories, cloud applications, and SaaS and security tools – are increasingly distributed, Grazman said.
“Add in cloud computing, remote work, IoT [Internet of Things] growth, and the demand for cybersecurity mesh architecture has exploded,” he said. “Organizations need software that can handle the complexity and de-centralized nature of their IT and offer a single pane of glass to organize the chaos, understand the inter-play, and provide data including improved resiliency and outcomes.”
The demand for CSMA that Grazman highlighted is reflected in market numbers. Analysts with Global Market Insights expects the cybersecurity mesh space to grow from $1.3 billion last year to
$6.9 billion by 2034. Cybersecurity vendors like Check Point, Cyflare, Netenrich, and Mobius Partners include the tool in their portfolios.
“With the current trend of digital acceleration and hybrid workforces, many resources, including staff, are located and operating outside of what can be considered traditional network infrastructure,” Fortinet, another security firm with a CSMA offering, stated in a
column about the technology. “The big challenge now facing organizations and employees is the rate at which digital transformation is accelerating and increasing the risks and complexity of securing the expanded attack surface.”
Never Say Never
Grazman said Fenix24 doesn’t have other acquisitions “currently in the pipeline,” but added that the company will be opportunistic if other possible deals arise.
“Strategically, we mapped out a multi-year strategy and roadmap for Argos99 and evaluate potential acquisitions against our strategy and vision,” he said. “Both vArmour and appNovi accelerated the pace at which we could achieve these features. We will continue to evaluate future acquisitions against our own roadmap and what our Argos99 programming team is already executing against.”
