Twenty year old Auckland based digital forensics and data recovery firm Computer Forensics NZ is to expand the scope of its services to offer preventative cyber security services to the SMB market following its acquisition a year ago by two long-term employees of the firm.
The business was bought by Tom Orton, now co-director and chief technology officer, and Nicolas Thomas, now co-director and chief operating officer, from founder Brian Eardley-Wilmot who has since retired.
Orton said the company planned to move into the cyber security market “in a big way”, by providing cyber security assessments and gap analysis.
“Right now, there are only a handful of companies in New Zealand along with the big four accounting and professional services companies, who specialise in this work,” he said.
“We’re looking to offer similar services to the SMB market, particularly those with 10 to 15 employees – providing the same level of effectiveness as those firms but in a more cost-effective manner.”
Thomas said the move to cloud and managed services was putting increased pressure of businesses to secure their data and do everything they could to prevent breaches, and to minimise impact when breaches do occur.
“We are stepping away from just being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to be the fence at the top, taking a more proactive approach to cyber security and data security and protecting New Zealand businesses,” he said.
“We can assess business’s data security and find holes they might easily overlook, because we think of things differently after having had 20 years of people calling us with horror stories of what has happened to them.
“We now want to flip that on its head and use that experience to prevent those situations in the first place, providing cyber security education, assessments and advice as well as remediation.”
Thomas said the nature of Computer Forensics’ current business meant it had a very low profile.
“If an employee has run off with their client list, a manager has committed fraud or they’ve suffered an attack and lost data because their servers weren’t backed up, we can sort it out and have very happy clients – but they’re not going to want to tell everyone about it!”