In this video, I spoke with Vijay Akasapu about his 25-year career in security and how his experience led him to start Cylerian eight years ago.

“I am what you could call old school,” said Akasapu, who started his career as an Infosec Engineer with Lockheed Martin in 1999.

Akasapu also worked at McAfee, Mandiant and FireEye before starting Cylerian after noticing a gap in the market for small-to-midsize enterprises that often rely on MSPs for cybersecurity. His goal was to build a platform to consolidate a plethora of security tools.

“I knew we had to build a platform from the ground up that catered to both security and operations,” he said. “What that entailed was essentially building out this multi-tenant platform from the ground up that consolidated a large number of tools that an enterprise would need. A lot of MSPs have to consolidate 20 different vendors to provide a security service. When they're doing that, they're going to be spending most of their day just dealing with tools, they're not going to have the time to service their clients, they won’t have the time to take part in more strategic initiatives. And so what we offer as a platform is a single place using a single agent for them to consolidate over 20 tools.

“The other way our platform helps MSPs grow is because we built it from the ground up, we are an AI-native platform. That provides us the ability to embed AI into the agent itself and essentially frees up the MSP’s time to not just use our platform for security threats but also to leverage some AI features.”

Akasapu will speak at the MSP Summit Sept. 16 in Orlando, Fla. on a keynote panel, “The Revolution of IT Services: Leading Vendors Share their Vision for MSP Success.” He will be joined by Mike Psenka of Moovila and Wilfredo Santiago of Blackpoint Cyber on the panel moderated by Canalys’s Jay McBain.

Watch the full video for more insights.