To do so, we are partnering with businesses across the industry and leaning on Microsoft for Startups to support this vision together.
The origin of Indominus
With a leadership team that had experience with cybersecurity, tooling, and the Microsoft consulting ecosystem, Indominus Managed Security was born to help small businesses protect themselves by providing three distinct pillars as service offers:
- Cybersecurity as a Culture, to support executives and business owners tackle the challenges of creating a cybersecurity culture.
- Cybersecurity as Managed Services, for small and medium enterprises who need to become secure but who do not have the in-house talents to achieve this.
- Cybersecurity as a Project, for larger enterprises who want to support deploying a Microsoft cyber defense system within their company, but have their own internal teams take over operations and management.
Services, like Spartan Guard, become a smoke detector for a business’s devices, from Windows desktop to iPhone or Android tablet, and connect them to a customized alarm central that is fully staffed. We have learned that this type of solution has been integral in helping small businesses protect their businesses.
Helping small business owners stay protected
We have learned that only 6% of tech CEOs have a technical background.¹
We learned that business owners may not be aware that they are responsible and accountable in the event of a breach or cyberattack. Knowing this, our leader, René-Sylvain Bédard, got to work and developed the SECURE methodology to better support small business leaders:
- Survey their current digital estate, answering the question, “what needs to be secured?” Understanding what needs to be protected is paramount to any smart defenses. A blanket statement cannot help you, because it would most likely be unusable in an emergency, but also it can be very costly.
- Educate, first the owner, then the management team and then the employees. As René-Sylvain states, “Education is an inspiration game.” As leaders, your people look up to you, model you, and also are aligning to what is important for you. When you start paying attention to cybersecurity and show that it is important, suddenly, it becomes important for the entire company.
- Construct your cyber defenses, going deep into what is required to gain full visibility into what is happening in your environment—removing blind spots where cybercriminals can hide. Don’t forget our base maxim, less is more. If you can reduce the quantity of technologies, everyone will be able to deepen their knowledge of it. Hence, if you plan a solution, ensure that most of your pieces come from the same vendor. You lower the complexity and potential compatibility issues. You reduce the potential blind spots.
- Unify, let all those new cybersecurity concepts percolate into your People, Processes and Technologies. Now that you have a known landscape, you’ve demonstrated that cybersecurity is important, and created a plan to infuse it within your company. The ecosystem is also important. If your partners have access to your environment or are trusted, you have to make sure they are secured as well.
- Review, ensure that you have metrics that measure your cybersecurity and build an executive dashboard. Make sure that you include an accepted risks ledger, an annual audit of your configurations, and a yearly intrusion testing. Ensure that you can test your culture and its various aspects mentioned earlier. What does not get measured does not improve.
- Evolve your plan because cybersecurity is anything but static. You need to be vigilant and stay informed about the upcoming technological shifts, which can render your plan obsolete or weakened. The best example is the new age of AI. Have any of you planned your cybersecurity to ensure that an AI would not broadcast sensitive information like merger and acquisition (M&A) plan or your management’s salary? If your plan has not been reviewed in the past 18 months, there is a good chance it did not.
How we created an automated army to fight cybercriminals
When we started analyzing the market to see how we could make this as simple as possible for small business owners, we rapidly realized that the Microsoft stack was center to everything we were doing. Most of the businesses we were targeting were already using Microsoft 365, and the integrated tools were recognized and utilized by larger enterprises as well.
We knew we had to show value for the small and medium businesses to ask them to make an investment in their security. So we got to work. We built our first Minimum Loveable Product (MLP), Spartan Guard, and we made sure that we could automate most of its deployment. Then we ensured that all its data would remain within the customer’s tenant (for governance), then we set out to get a strong team to manage it—globally dispersed, but locally accessing.
We leverage Microsoft Sentinel for our customers, automating its deployment and infusing it with our expertise to reduce the financial impact for our SME customers. We built our base monitoring command center, Spartan Towers, off this.
How Microsoft for Startups helped us get off the ground
The Microsoft for Startups program enabled us to spread our wings and fully test out our product. With access to the Expert Network and Azure credits, we were able to structure, test, and accelerate our solutions. Our MLP went from protecting devices to all aspects of a small business, from devices to cloud components.
Working with Microsoft has enabled us to now cover:
- Identity through a managed instance of Microsoft Defender for Identity
- Devices through Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft Intune
- Data through Microsoft Priva and Microsoft Purview
- Servers through Microsoft Defender for Business Servers
- Microsoft 365 through Microsoft Defender for Office 365
- Firewalls and network devices by including them to Microsoft Sentinel for increased visibility
- Cloud components through Microsoft Defender for Cloud
- Connected objects—Internet of Things (IoT)—through Microsoft Defender for IoT
All those products come preconfigured to connect within the customer monitoring command center, Spartan Towers, which comes free with any of those products. With additional managed updates and managed vulnerabilities, we have helped customers not only detect vulnerabilities, but also properly remediate them. This has enabled us to bring one of our customer’s devices cybersecurity score from 6% to 93% after only 7 days.
Better together
We are deeply thankful to Microsoft for the support we’ve received through the Microsoft for Startups program, which has allowed us to test and iterate on our solution to better serve our customers.
Thanks to their commitment to startups, we have been able to access experts and technologies that we could not have otherwise seen or touched. Now, it is infused into our very products.
We invite you all to join us in our vision to #StoptheBully. Together, let’s protect businesses and come together to help stop cyber criminality.
¹50 Interesting C-Suite Facts and Statistics 2025, Team DigitalDefynd.
