LegalEdge, a legal services company based in London, needed a solution which would ensure the security of its remote workforce. It turned to CyberSmart, a cybersecurity specialist for SMEs, which provides the government-backed Cyber Essentials certification, live customer support and a 24/7 monitoring app and dashboard that ensure devices are constantly protected.
Can you tell us a little bit about LegalEdge?
LegalEdge has been going for 10 years now, providing legal services in a different way. How legal services are provided has changed quite significantly over the past decade and we managed to get in from the outset of this change, which has been great. As a result of a lot of us working in-house at large tech companies, we now represent lots of tech companies and lots of start-ups. We provide legal services to tech companies on a flexible basis, with all our lawyers working remotely.
What were the security and/or compliance challenges you were looking to overcome?
For the most part, the challenges we faced stemmed from the fact that all our lawyers work flexibly. On the one hand, with all that is going on now, this has put us in a fortunate position to continue business as usual. However, with everyone working from home or the coffee shop as well as using their own personal devices, this has the potential of leaving many loose ends that threaten our company’s security – a fairly unique challenge that may not be unique for long and which CyberSmart really worked with us on.
Why is security important to your organisation?
As a legal services provider, we are very aware of risk – so security has always been important to us and is something we actively look to improve. Like many businesses, our team is a mix of employed staff and freelancers who use their own devices so we need to have that extra layer of protection.
When/how did you discover CyberSmart and why did you select them?
I’m on a COO network with a lot of fast growth tech companies, which has been a fantastic network for me and for a lot of the COOs on it too. That is how we heard about CyberSmart. There was a lot of discussion around GDPR at the time. The guys at CyberSmart came in and did a presentation for us.
As is typical in our industry, we are fairly slow to update on tech, but we just really liked the way CyberSmart did things and how they talked about their product.
Because we’ve got a fairly unique set-up, it was really important for us to up our game on cybersecurity: they were just really good and helpful for us in what otherwise could have been a bit of a painful process.
Where does the company stand in implementing the solution? Is it complete or still in process?
It’s always updating. We knew when we signed up that this was not a perfect, out-of-the-box solution and there have been a few little challenges along the way.
Fortunately, the CyberSmart platform is really easy to use and I am not a techie whatsoever. There’s certainly more functionality than there used to be.
Which of CyberSmart’s capabilities are most valuable to you and why?
Just that extra layer of security for our remote workforce. Our model was always flexible, but the CyberSmart guys have really enabled us to embed security into this flexibility. When I used to travel on the tube and log in at the stations to check my emails, there was always that worry that I wasn’t secure. Now I know that I’ve got the level of security that I can have, or that I need to have, to protect myself.
You hear about hacking, but you don’t really worry about it until something bad happens – which now we don’t have to.
It has helped us up our game. With less tech-savvy people, you’re never sure what is or is not okay. We might think we’re secure and actually not be. CyberSmart has eliminated this ambiguity for us.
I’m working from a MacBook; some people are working from old PCs. Everybody’s on different devices, including iPhones. Regardless, the guys at CyberSmart have all our bases covered.
We have some IT support now, but we didn’t when we first started this journey and they were there every step of the way to help us implement it. In order to get the Cyber Essentials certification, we had to pass an important questionnaire.
This required us to put in place a fairly complex policy that explained to our people what they had to do or stop doing.
For example, they could not log into their devices from a coffee shop without a secure connection. But then we brought in a VPN, which helped to resolve that issue and the team at CyberSmart worked with us to make sure we were doing all the right stuff along the way.
Please quantify or describe the business benefit derived via time and/or cost saved from using CyberSmart’s security solutions.
It was important for us to do better with our cybersecurity, so while it is an investment, the cost is reasonable for a business of our size and nature. We liked what CyberSmart offered and how they conducted themselves; the fact that they came recommended from another business we knew was also very reassuring.
What advice can you give someone looking for security solutions to address similar challenges to the ones you were facing?
Give CyberSmart a call. They have been a hugely helpful partner and their customer service is outstanding. We have clients who say: ‘I need somebody who’s got my back on these things’ and that’s when you outsource to the right people for the right price; that’s exactly what these guys have done for us.