Symend is genuinely driven by "the science of engagement" – A motto that ultimately reflects the solution they have built. Symend’s digital engagement platform uses behavioral science and data driven insights to empower customers to resolve past due bills. In late 2017, Keep Secure expanded its involvement with Symend as the company started working with global enterprises. Initially brought in by CEO Hanif Joshaghani Keep Secure started working directly with Symend’s then newest CTO Dean Skelton. As Symend started piquing larger clients' interests, both Hanif and Dean knew they would need to find experts to answer their prospective clients' security questions.

Here is how Keep Secure helped secure Symend's success by building the security required to turn enterprise-sized customers into trusting long term partners.

Challenges

At the time, Keep Secure had already implemented a 5-phase security roadmap and completed Symend's very first application security assessment. Even with this, the clients that Symend gained traction with required a level of security compliance and infrastructure scale that could not be met by Symend's team alone. They needed an additional workforce and experts already familiar with enterprise security.

Dean had just begun with Symend and worked with a small team of software engineers to steadily build a minimal viable product. "We needed some experienced guidance to come in and really make sure we were making the right decisions as we built out the product, but also the infrastructure around it." He said, "So that we could live up the covenants that we are protecting personal information on behalf of our customers."

 

Solution

Keep Secure is composed of a team of security consultants and developers who have worked in enterprise environments for over ten years. Symend and the expert consultants at Keep Secure started working by implementing a CISO as a Service program, giving Symend executives the policies, procedures, and documentation needed to begin tackling client security questionnaires. This service provided the Symend executive team with an acting CISO that answered all security questions and enforcing policies to the staff at Symend. The DevOps team at Keep Secure handled the implementation of many of the app's security policies. Our expert cloud infrastructure admins and developers stepped in with the engineers of Symend, and together, architected secure solutions that our team turned around and deployed into Microsoft Azure. The Keep Secure team provided technical solutions around securely transferring data between clients of Symend and the Symendplatform, Single Sign-on, and Mobile Device Management with role-based access controls, azure application automation, and disaster recovery planning.

Results

With Keep Secure handling CISO, DevOps and Endpoint Management, Symend converted four enterprise mobility clients out of successful pilot programs into commercial contracts. Keep Secure's work made it easy for Symend to build their own IT and DevOps departments as they started to outgrow their startup status . Our DevOps experts were also pivotal in Symend's US expansion. The work done in the US expansion helped Symend to land its first major US mobility client. Keep Secure continues to act as Symend's CISO, and our CISO as a Service continues to help Symend's growth into new markets as they take on SOC and ISO security compliances.

Symend's leadership has been pivotal in securing its success. Their foresight to put security first resonated well with the Keep Secure team. It is what continues to guarantee their success.