Gordon Cowan: CyBrilliance Helping Businesses Advance Their Cyber Resilience Strategy

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Gordon Cowan

CyBrilliance exists to help businesses advance their cyber resilience strategy. We are not a cyber security company. Our sights are on protecting business data, continuity, and speeding up recovery with little to no downtime in the event of an incident. We identify, test, and offer cyber resilience tools that enhance data security governance and other challenges not addressed by cyber security.

Tell us about yourself?

I’m Gordon Cowan, the founder and CEO of CyBrilliance. I previously owned a niche insurance consultancy firm that focused on employee benefits. At that time, about 85 per cent of the market was represented by a handful of insurance companies. There wasn’t a huge choice for the types of benefits available or easy alignment to a client company’s goals and objectives. There had to be a better way. There was. I found it, and I did something about it. That shook things up, and now I’m set on taking the same approach to help secure cyber-based operations for all sorts of organizations.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

To develop a way to easily show that cyber resilience is a crucial companion technology to any data security effort. Thankfully that’s now in place, and the benefits can be realized faster for everyone.

What problem does your business solve?

Time. We don’t make any technology. We leave that to our partner experts. What we do is the research to help others make informed decisions faster. Our investigations and testing take months. That’s months of time saved for CIOs, CISOs and IT teams who already have enough to do being responsible for their organization’s operational health.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

It’s the same inspiration I had with the insurance market to move things along and find a better way. I’ve become increasingly interested in understanding why so many cyber incidences happen and how they worm their way in with the rotten objective to hold data hostage and halt operations. Any organization is at risk of a successful breach, and that’s tough on reputations and wallets.

There are alternative methods that can help companies better protect their data and operations. CyBrilliance is a business cyber continuity hub where IT leaders have easy access to other ideas, and we’ve already looked into how these solutions work.

What is your magic sauce?

How we do what we do. Our team puts in the rigorous effort so that we only recommend technologies that have been tested to beyond and back.

Ask yourself these questions: What if you could make your data utterly useless to a cyber criminal (if they’ve even managed to get their hands on it), therefore obliterating their ransom demands? What if you suffered a hit but could get back up and running in hours instead of days or weeks? We’ve tried and tested solutions that can add these kinds of benefits.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

To accompany Canadian companies along the road to advancing their operational agility with cyber resilience. Resilience is relevant for every business, be it manufacturing, retail, healthcare, supply chain, finance… the list is infinite. We will be adding options to our cyber continuity hub and extending to other regions. Hackers have no borders, and neither do we.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Getting across the difference between cyber security and cyber resilience. Yes, it’s essential to have cyber security measures in place. But it’s equally essential to be able to carry on operating during and after an incident. And that’s the difference. The resilience of an organization will return a company (and its data) to the last known good state and functionality – fast.

How can people get involved?

You can find out about our trusted technology partner’s solutions on our website.

CyBrilliance works with distribution channel partners as well as enterprise end-users.

Vendors are also invited to show us their best business cyber resilience offerings if they’re interested in joining our effort to help organizations lock down their operations.