Thunder Down Under - Here Comes CybereCert to the US!

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Harry Brelsford  00:00

Harry here enjoying what we call the dog days of summer. But I guess I'm with the guest I'll introduce you to who's probably enjoying the dog days of winter. He's down under. And so you know, our heat is starting to arrive, and it will, you know, I'm with Ryan \Ettridge, CyberCert. Ryan, what's the weather like there? It's your winter, but, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. What? What's that look like?

Ryan Ettridge  00:31

Yeah. Well, I'm sitting here with a blanket on my lap at desk. And so winter here is about 14 degrees Celsius, whatever that is in Fahrenheit. What does that translate to? Harry, yeah, I don't know, man, but it's cold. It's pretty cold for

Harry Brelsford  00:47

me. Dipper, yep, yep. And, well, hey, so introduce yourself, and then I'm going to have you bring up a piece of art and tell us about cyber cert. But for first, you what? You know? What? What? Harry, what rock did you climb out from in Australia? The Outback?

Ryan Ettridge  01:08

Yeah, yeah. So East Coast Australia is where the density of the population is. I'm in Brisbane, which is the Queensland, the northern state of the East Coast, and so Ryan Ettridge is my name, and I'm the co founder and CEO of cyber cert, which I'll talk you through a little bit about in a moment, Harry. But that's me sitting here in in the winter weather. Three daughters I'm about to take to school shortly, and the day is just kicking off with a cup of coffee in the hand.

Harry Brelsford  01:41

Yeah? Always like Brisbane. You know, back in my GO, GO days with Microsoft, Small Business Server we favored Australia. Used to build in some, some extra time on the Gold Coast, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, always enjoyed it. Okay, well, let's, let's cut to the chase at your leisure, if you want to bring up a screen share that has, you know, something that's representative of what you do. And you know, this is first of many conversations. So, you know, welcome. Want to hear your story.

Ryan Ettridge  02:15

Yeah, thanks, Harry, yeah. So let me know when you can see that on the screen there. This is really just the landing page of the website. Yeah CyberCert is certification, cyber security certification for small businesses. It's the only one in the world outside of the likes of the UK Cyber Security Essentials and Singapore with their jurisdiction based certifications. And so cyber cert fills the gaps for small businesses that don't really have a standard to align to, and therefore don't have a certification to align to. And certification for small businesses is the proof that they've done something that is internationally recognized to a standard so that they can focus on the things that they do best, which is selling flowers or cooking burgers for us or fixing our teeth or giving us legal advice or whatever our small business friends do. So cyber cert was specifically designed with the small business in mind, because the enterprise grade cyber security standards and certifications just don't help. In fact, they break the small business when they try to implement them, because the small business, you know, I use this term a little bit exaggeratingly, if that's a word, and that is that small businesses can't spell cybersecurity in the same way that I can't spell accounting. It's not our job to be experts in those areas. So we have to have a mechanism and a system in place that allows us not to know how to do cyber security ourselves, but knowing that it's being done, and that's what cyber cert exists for. Harry,

Harry Brelsford  03:53

yeah, yeah. So a couple of questions, because I'm, I'm pro certification back in her rehearsal, in fact, I should have pointed them out. I, you know, I have a brag office, right? You know, the the frame certifications, the acrylic, you know, Best of Show, right? You know, I'm that guy. And, yeah, and, you know, I guess when you retire, you throw them out. I've known a couple people that, yeah, I left Microsoft. I just threw them all out, I believe. And certification made my career right back in the 90s, with Windows Server and beyond, and yeah, and it meant something. And then, you know, we kind of went into the wilderness for a while, you know, paper certs, and, you know, people are just getting trained on taking the test. So we went out of the wilderness, but they're back. And I'm assuming number one, you have more meat on those bones. And then number two is part and par. Show to that would be, is your audience realistically that the MSP would take this to hang a plaque on their wall kind of thing?

Ryan Ettridge  05:10

Yeah, yeah. That's really good questions and and it is a really common question Harry, because when people think about certifications, initially, they think about certifying themselves. To your point, it's like you get your Microsoft certifications, your Cisco, your whatever, right? This is not a certification for individuals. This is a certification for your business, okay? This is, this is to demonstrate to your customers and your shareholders and your clients, enterprise clients, government clients that your business is cyber certified, so you can legally demonstrate to insurers, to supply chain clients, that you have met a particular standard that is internationally recognized, SMB, 1001 is that standard. I'm not going to get too technical, but that's the standard that CyberCert certifies a business against. In the same way you might be familiar the listeners might be familiar with ISO 9001 which is, you know your quality and your safety standards and all of the other types of familiar standards for your business essentially becomes your license to operate. Cybersecurity is not at that stage yet. For most of, let's say about 90% of SMBs across the world, there is not really that quote, unquote, license to operate in cybersecurity just yet, but I'm sure it's coming. And in some jurisdictions, as I said, UK and others, it is actually in place. Now, CyberCert is that for your business, and it, and it's, it starts at the earliest stages of a small business, being, you know, one to two person shop. There's a there's a certification. You can even see on the screen. It starts from $95 that's the bond certification for the business. And it moves up as an organizer as an SMB matures to get to dealing with personal information, dealing with more sensitive and even secret to the organization information, and dealing with some really advanced cybersecurity threats. That's what CyberCert is about. Harry is to protect the business and to you. MSP, question, by design, I'm just, if it's okay, I'm just going to move to a different screen because it's really important.

Harry Brelsford  07:27

Yeah, dude, we'll engage in a very different level down the road, right? A full on webinar, and we'll go there. But yeah,

Ryan Ettridge  07:38

so yeah, give us the this is the MSP one, right? So in the same way that I was being a little bit joking about the SMB doesn't know how to spell cybersecurity, and we don't expect them to what we have written into this requirement is number one at each level of the certification is that you must have someone who can help you with that. That's the MSP. So the MSPs job is really to help their SMBs guide them through the certification journey that cyber cert lays out.

Harry Brelsford  08:12

Yeah, yeah, no, I like your approach and like I say we're going to make good trouble soon as they say, and double click into that. So tell us a little bit more about your company. You know, you got a couple partners, your geography, I know you're keen on on the US. So talk to me about your company and your partners and that kind of thing.

Ryan Ettridge  08:42

Yeah, well, a nice flow on from that. MSP powered requirement number one, cyber cert doesn't consult. Cyber cert doesn't run the programs for the small businesses ourselves. We really rely on partners to be able to do that. So if you can imagine, my role is to facilitate that ecosystem of partners to be able to assist their SMBs. And so we have cyber cert launched in Australia a few years ago, and that essentially is other roots of CyberCert is in Australia and New Zealand at the moment. That's where the momentum has built. And so we have 300 partners across ANZ, okay, 300 MSPs,

Harry Brelsford  09:27

yeah, no, that's that my, my company. You know, I live in this world that that's a real number, dude,

Ryan Ettridge  09:33

yeah, yeah, this is real. So, so really, you know, I got a call from one of our big technology partners last week and said, Dude, we're all in. And I said, What do you mean? We've written our next year's strategies around SMB 1001 this standard like this is the real deal. Now people have lit MSPs partners, tech vendors, insurers have actually integrated and written their entire. Strategies around SMB, 1001 and cyber cert, which is very, very humbling. It's very reassuring, and it's very exciting that this is actually, this is not just a new product or service. This is actually a movement that we're very proud to be leading from ANZ and so 300 partners. There's just over 3000 small businesses already certifying. So we have that amount of small businesses moving through the process either certified now or about to be certified. And we formed a partnership with Pax eight. For those that don't know that's the world's largest software

Harry Brelsford  10:38

by the way. Let me yeah, let me interrupt. I didn't know you at the time. I saw Wayne at PAX. Say, did, did? Yes, were you

Speaker 1  10:45

there? Who were there? We had a booth there. Yeah, we had a booth over at the side. So, yeah,

Ryan Ettridge  10:52

so good. I know Wayne was trying to get us to chat Mary, but we must have missed out in time. But yeah, we're giving away gold squishies for those the listeners who were there. But so we launched with Pax eight Harry in four weeks ago, in well, we launched in the US via Pax eight beyond conference for four weeks ago, whenever we were there, and we're just moving through the process now to launch that officially in the Pax eight marketplace in the next few weeks. Which means, of course, there's 42,000 partners or so that Pax eight has accessible through that marketplace and CyberCert t, giving its uniqueness, is, of course, the only certification in the marketplace there. So the goal is to activate as many MSPs and partners as we can. So not just MSPs, but consultants, value added resellers in a certain sense, where they can start to shift from var to MSP. So cyber cert, is that mechanism for them? The US surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, is the same as the Australian, New Zealand market, you know, Ms MSPs need to be aware of this, and then they see the value prop. And then once they got it, they run with it. And in the same way, insurance is a huge cyber insurance is a huge driver. It's exactly the same here. So the beautiful thing about what we've demonstrated here in ANZ is it's copy and paste. It's just a it's just a way bigger market in the US, of course. Eric,

Harry Brelsford  12:20

yeah, yeah, no, I got it. And hey, final question before I let you go for now and again, we'll, we'll chat again soon. But you know, again, I'm thinking back to the old MCSE days, and God forbid, Novell NetWare, not to age myself. Either was a whole industry, and I actually knew some of the training centers in Seattle, the owners, right? They, they had whole industry of these three day and five day classes, you know, in a in an office building space, you know, classroom, yeah, so instructor led, and then, you know, that morphed. Then, then we became an era, and I missed instructor led, and I have some friends who are instructed. Then that's kind of, quite frankly, kind of dried up. But, you know, then it, then it became online self study, right? Microsoft, everything. And what are you instructor led online self study. You know what's your paradigm for learning?

Ryan Ettridge  13:30

Well, it depends on who's learning. And so really, our job is to train MSPs to be able to guide their SMBs through to certification readiness. Again, you don't it's not so much that an individual becomes a cyber cert qualified individual, is that an organization does so like

Harry Brelsford  13:50

that, by the way, that that was always the drawback with the MCSE as Harry jumps jobs, well, he just walked out the door, right? Yeah, Harry,

Ryan Ettridge  14:01

yeah. It's actually like, crest in in your penetration testing world crest and some others, they actually accredit the organization based on the number of people that have the qualification. And so I really like that balance as well. We have to be able to scale. Is what I'm going to say. Like, there's 900,000 addressable small businesses in Australia. There's 30 million in the US. There's 300 million across the world. Instructor led doesn't scale, unfortunately, and that is the world that we live in today. But it doesn't mean that we can't do semi or hybrid online instructor led, or in some cases, the Pax eight Academy, for example, they do in person and instructor led, and so I'm not writing that off. I just think it definitely has to be a combination of digital even avatars. Some people learn through doing as opposed to reading, some people listen, some people like to see people and chat to a community. So we have to address all of those things, and that's what's evolving.

Harry Brelsford  14:58

Yeah. And I'll make a personal comment, we'll call it good man. But the I'm an active learner, and there's some reasons for that. I a lifelong of ADHD, which I call my secret weapon, yeah, so yeah, I'll never be confused with some rule with and God bless them, but Asperger's syndrome or something, right? Totally different, yeah, totally different motion. And, you know, it's, it's a big, beautiful world, but I would learn by doing. I actually, you know, that's why I really enjoyed the hands on labs, right? We went through that phase, you know, they set up 30 laptops. You know, you get your laptop and you go through exercises. Well, see, I'm an active learner, right? Yeah. So, yeah, you know. And you know, you're too young. But we had a thing called the registry.

Speaker 1  15:53

I remember that the registry, yeah,

Harry Brelsford  15:57

you had to go into all that. Well, well, hey, my friend. Hey, stay on the line. Ryan. Ryan Ettridge at CyberCert, thank you sir, and we'll have you back

Ryan Ettridge  16:07

soon. Amazing. Thank you so much, Harry. Thank you to all the listeners, too. You.