Partner Spotlight: Gigamon and ICM Cyber Help Customers Secure Their Data and Networks

ICM Cyber was founded by Allan Black in 2001 with one goal in mind: providing the best cybersecurity solutions possible backed up by unparalleled customer service and engineering expertise.

We sat down with ICM Cyber founder and CEO, Allan Black, and Vice President of Strategy and Execution, Mark Mahovlich, to talk about ICM Cyber’s network and security solutions and its ongoing partnership with Gigamon.

Gigamon: Who is ICM Cyber and what is the company history?

Allan: Founded in 2001, ICM Cyber is proud to serve more than 525 companies throughout North America. Our clients cover the spectrum of industries and range from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

ICM Cyber has three main focuses: assisting our clients with the integration of high-quality security technologies, helping our clients understand their current risk profile through security assessments, and helping our clients reduce risk by developing sustainable risk mitigation programs.

Gigamon: What does your company name stand for?

Mark: ICM Cyber was originally founded as a “clean internet pipe” company, hence the Internet Content Management name. As the organization has grown and evolved into other areas of cyber defense, we rebranded into the current ICM Cyber name.

Gigamon: Describe your company culture. What makes you tick?

Allan: We created an organization designed to help our clients successfully and sustainably execute cyber defense programs and their supporting toolsets. As such, we created a delivery-focused atmosphere where barriers to success are removed, and our people are empowered to solve client challenges. Doing the right thing for our clients and partners permeates everything we do and every decision we make.

Gigamon: When and how did you become a Gigamon partner?

Mark: We have been a Gigamon Partner since 2017. At that time, we were evaluating technologies that could help support clients’ TLS and SSL decryption standards in proxy environments. We were ultimately impressed with the entire Gigamon portfolio and its excellent customer satisfaction, and so our partnership began.

Gigamon: If you had to describe Gigamon with just one word, what would it be?

Allan: Integral.

Gigamon: What are some of your market’s specifics, advantages, and challenges when it comes to network security and visibility?

Mark: ICM Cyber works with more than 500 clients in 44 states in multiple industry segments, including banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and federal and local governments. While the specific tactical needs of each of our clients varies, some things remain the same: They are all trying to successfully navigate their way through cloud adoption and work from anywhere, on anything, while having a demand for a highly available client experience. Clients who have successfully adapted to a new world of compute, store, and information access find themselves in a position to rethink business and profit from being first to market with new products and service offerings.

Gigamon: Which Gigamon features stand out the most and make the product outstrip its competitors?

Allan: We believe that GigaVUE^® Cloud Security is a big differentiator in today’s high cloud-compute-centric world. Organizations are increasingly adopting multiple cloud platforms for speed to market and reliability, but each hosted application opens the potential for latency and security issues. Clients need solutions that provide comprehensive visibility into the data flow of their cloud network and the reliability of transactions.

Gigamon: How do you see ICM Cyber fit together with Gigamon to solve your customers’ problems?

Mark: Given the Gigamon team’s focused drive to develop the best solution to solve client challenges for network security and visibility, adaptability to IT modernization efforts, and dedication to truly supporting clients to success align with ICM Cyber’s core mission, it would be hard not to be aligned together.

Gigamon: Where do you see the trends in network security and visibility in three year’s time?

Allan: As laid out in our Defending the Next Decade cyber defense model, we believe clients will continue to embrace high-distributed infrastructure and network environments (hybrid cloud and multi-tenant cloud) to take advantage of speed to market and total cost of ownership savings.

We also believe the workforce will stay highly mobile and oriented to work from anywhere. Bad actors will adapt attacks to more personalized intrusions. This will lead to a focus on network artifact collection and behavioral analytics as our primary means of determining if an organization is compromised, either from an external threat or internal threat. We anticipate that network and application performance (QoS) over the public internet will be a necessity.

Gigamon: Provide an anecdote that customers share when they talk about our products and your products and services?

Mark: “ICM Cyber and Gigamon showed us a wealth of capabilities beyond network TAPs and SSL decryption. We found and shored up several gaps as a result, and we are safer as a result” – Director of Information Security, Cloud – Banking

Gigamon: What is the most memorable moment associated with Gigamon as a partner?

Allan: There have been so many over the years it would be difficult to choose. However, we had a situation where a client had a critical need for Gigamon’s toolset, but due to budgets and other issues, the client was not able to immediately fund the purchase. The Gigamon team worked with us to deliver the product and services right away, with flexibility on payment to allow ICM Cyber and the client to fund the solution over time.

Gigamon: What are the wow moments associated with Gigamon?

Mark: In recent memory, the general availability of the Hawk platform for cloud visibility and security. It was a moment when our clients, and ICM Cyber, were saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a solution that spanned the hybrid cloud infrastructure?” Right when that inflection point was heaviest, Gigamon delivered.

Gigamon: What are some of the new challenges you see in the market that your partnership with Gigamon can solve?

Allan: Organizations are increasingly challenged by the movement away from an internally controlled private network to either hybrid (private-public) or completely public delivery mechanisms. The tenets of network support (QoS, application latency, resiliency) and security (mapping and controlling inbound and outbound data flows) are suddenly not as defined as they have been over the last decade. The needs still exist, but we have to find new ways to gain visibility and control.

Gigamon: What are the positive business outcomes as a Gigamon partner?

Mark: Our clients who use Gigamon toolsets are secure, well supported, and able to adapt to new challenges. As a partner, we want our clients’ investments to work consistently every day, and when they don’t, we want an attentive technology partner. When our clients are happy, we are happy, and of course, this helps us be profitable as well.

Gigamon: What unique capabilities does this partnership bring to your business?

Allan: Gigamon is integral to our ability to offer our clients a tested, verified stack of cyber defense solutions that address the challenges created by compute modernization efforts. Gigamon’s ecosystem friendliness allows us to combine multiple tools to solve problems.

Gigamon: What are some of the benefits of the Gigamon Partner Program that stand out? Trainings? Incentives? Discounts? Co-marketing?

Mark: We have an excellent relationship with Gigamon’s channel team. We enjoy all the benefits of product roadmaps, enablement training, and marketing funds to support Gigamon evangelization events.

Thank you Allan, Mark, and ICM Cyber, for making time for us and being such a wonderful partner.