“2017 has been a good year for AN Security and the move to the new office will allow us to finally scale to our full potential while creating both a better work environment and more customer engagement space,” explains David Hood, AN Security Founder and MD. The new space includes dedicated meeting and demonstration rooms and extended staging areas for proof of concept projects.

In terms of numbers, AN Security has grown its headcount by around a third in the last 12 months and revenues have also increased by almost a fifth. “The biggest area of growth has been in managed services delivered using our co-driver model,” explains Hood, “This has grown by about 35% while traditional on-premise solutions have been stable with a slight increase of around 6%.”

In Hood’s view, there has been a big push by non-security resellers into the managed security space which has both clouded customer perception and also led to opportunities, “A few resellers think security is easy - they might sell it in with lots of promises, but increasingly we are seeing that it simply doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations,” comments Hood.

“We have had a few major projects this year where we have been called in to fix somebody else’s botched managed security service implementation which is, of course great for us, but suggests that there is still a lack of expertise out in the market.”

In terms of customer focus, Hood notes that there is still a wide divergence in terms of attitudes when it comes to security posture and awareness, “However, there is definitely more investment in consolidation technologies such as SIEM and better awareness of cloud based solutions,” than in previous years.

From a technology front AN Security has retained its key vendor relationships including Palo Alto Networks, Pulse Secure and Logrhythm, but is now in the process of evaluating Gigamon as an additional part of its portfolio. “Technology like Gigamon is very complementary and provides additional value to an existing security deployment,” says Hood, “Adding a new product takes time when you perform detailed due diligence and to get technical teams up to speed - but we hope to officially sign up as a certified partner early this year.”

In terms of overall sentiment, Hood believes that 2018 will be a positive year. “Surprisingly, we have not had many conversions around GDPR or Brexit in terms of information security implications,” adds Hood, “This might change this year, but at the moment there is little panic about either deadline and by and large, most of the organisations we speak with are more focused on how to avoid becoming victim to the next Wannacry type attack – which is a much more likely event during 2018.”