Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and the midmarket need strong cybersecurity as much as any other organization these days. 

That’s one of the problems Coro solves.  

There are currently 33.2 million small businesses in America, which when combined account for 99.9% of all businesses in the United States. Beyond that, small businesses are credited with just under two-thirds (63%) of the new jobs created from 1995 to 2021.

These companies are the economic backbone of America, and deserve to be protected just as much as large enterprises. In fact, 50% of SMBs have been the victims of cyber attack and over 60% of those attacked go out of business afterwards, according to the National Cybersecurity Institute.

Unfortunately, many SMBs and smaller community organizations, like schools, don’t have the economic resources to invest in today’s ultra-complex and overly-pricey cybersecurity solutions that really don’t make the best fit. 

In this interview, Sean Martin from ITSPmagazine Podcast Network, quizzes Dror Liwer, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Coro, about the pitfalls of SMBs and the midmarket, and why Coro was created to help protect many of the too-often overlooked organizations that need it.

Watch the full interview or read the transcript, which we’ve included below.

Learn more about the Coro platform.

Sean Martin: We’re ready for another seven minutes here on ITSP Magazine with a new short brand story. Today I’m joined by Dror Liwer, co-founder of Coro, the company offering small-and-medium-sized businesses cloud-based cybersecurity for every part of their company—protecting email, data, cloud apps, devices, even users.

And I believe even more than that, which we’ll probably talk about today. Welcome, Dror.

Dror Liwer: Thank you for having me, Sean.

Sean Martin: It’s good to have you on again. And so let’s get into it. So give us a sense of the state of cybersecurity in the mid-market, maybe based on some conversations you’ve recently had as well, and why this segment has become or is a focus for the team at Coro.

Dror Liwer: So it’s mid-market and below. So we are looking at truly the backbone of the economy. These are the people that produce 63 percent of the GDP in the Western world, provide employment for 70 percent of a population in the Western world. Yet, they’re completely overlooked by the cybersecurity industry at large. Or, basically, the current cybersecurity industry is very happy to take their money, but really is not interested in building a product that fits them.

And that’s really what we decided to do. We decided that these people who are the salt of the Earth deserve the kind of security that bigger enterprise organizations have in a way that they can actually consume it, pay for it, and use it. And that’s really the mission that that we have as a company.

Sean Martin: So you say organizations, vendors, security vendors, and service providers, are happy to take the money and force feed enterprise-grade stuff onto the small market infrastructure. Where does that typically break down?

Dror Liwer: First of all, in many cases, my customers wouldn’t be able to afford many of those products.

So then they make really tough decisions on which parts of their business should they protect. Because they can’t afford full protection, right? So that’s one thing that is creating huge amount of pain for this industry. But even if they could afford it, they now need to go out and buy 15 to 20 different disparate products, point solutions, and try to manage them.

My customers don’t have a very large IT team. Many of them don’t even have a cybersecurity team. The IT team needs to do this kind of work. They don’t have the time to get trained on all of these different products. They don’t have the time to manage these different products.

They don’t have the knowledge on how to configure everything and integrate everything. And what ends up happening is actually a false sense of security that results in breaches.

What we’ve come to the table and said, forget all this headache. Here’s a single platform that covers, as you mentioned before, the user, the device to use the network. They’re connected through the cloud services and the email and the file servers; they’re connected to everything, including data governance, in one platform that has a single dashboard that is very simple to use and one endpoint agent for all of the different aspects of security on that endpoint, which means we’ve taken away an enormous amount of the workload.

We’re giving it to the customers for a price that they can easily afford and we’ve taken away all of the complexity of integrating, managing, running after events and so forth so they can focus on running their business, focus on really meaningful tasks, and not the menial work of administrating cybersecurity products.

Sean Martin: So I picture this picture, two types of organizations here: those that have the wherewithal that can include skills and staffing and budget and whatnot to take control of this themselves. And (then) those that don’t want to or can’t do that and turn to a service provider for some assistance. How does what you offer help both of those organizations?

Dror Liwer: Yeah, so even those that go through a service provider, the service provider is stuck in the same conundrum because if they need to build a very big stack in order to provide cybersecurity to an organization, that stack costs them a lot of money, and that cost gets offloaded to that end customer.

And also, that stack requires a very large, experienced, expensive team to run, and therefore, they need to offload that cost to the end customer. And then the customer needs to make the exact same decision. I’m going to only take email security from you because that’s all I can afford.

What we’ve done was we are now enabling those service providers to go to their customers and say, “no more.” You can actually have end-to-end, powerful security that you can afford, that we can actually manage on your behalf, because it reduced our workload, and therefore, those savings can be passed on to you.

The entire stack is a fraction of the cost of what it would’ve been had we bought it from other vendors or built a stack from point solutions and those savings can be passed on to you. So suddenly we have opened the small business and mid-market market to those service providers to be able to offer a truly powerful end-to-end cybersecurity capability to those customers who are in such dire need for cybersecurity.

Sean Martin: And I want to point out that there’s the setting up of the technologies, there’s a maintenance of them, there’s a management of them, but there’s also stuff happens still. There’s a human element involved and threat actors are progressive and things happen.

So you’re there to help as your partners are with some of the response stuff too, which I think is cool. So how the last few seconds here, Dror, how do folks get in touch with you and learn more?

Dror Liwer: You just go to our website, coro.net. There is a button there that connects you directly to one of our cybersecurity experts that could help you