James Goulding talks to Morten Kjaersgaard, CEO of Heimdal Security, about the company’s first 10 years
Danish cybersecurity provider Heimdal Security, which has a long-standing and productive history in the UK, celebrates its 10th anniversary this month.
Heimdal Corp was established in 2014 when it launched its first product, a DNS security solution called Threat Prevention, the seeds of which were sown in 2011, when, for the first time, a non-US team won the Defcon CTF ethical hacking competition with an innovative idea that subsequently revolutionised DNS security.
Today, Europe’s largest organically built cybersecurity business is a global player with 15,000 customers and a suite of more than 10 solutions designed to proactively address every cybersecurity challenge faced by businesses. In 2023 it integrated these solutions in the Heimdal XDR – Unified Security Platform, managed under a single dashboard and supported by a team of experts monitoring clients’ cyber environments 24/7.
Heimdal Security founder and CEO Morten Kjaersgaard attributes the company’s success to a number of factors, from its ‘visionary’ technology offering – ‘the widest technology stack in the security space’ – to a corporate culture that reflects his own energy and drive. “Behind it all is a very pushy, competitive, visionary person trying to drive the business to the front of the market all the time,” he said.
Best of breed
Heimdal started out with best- of-breed products for patch management and DNS security and, according to Kjaersgaard, it has had a history of innovation ever since.
“We were the first business in the world to position ourselves against ransomware back in early 2016, resulting in a Number One ranking on Google, so we got completely swamped when all the ransomware attacks broke out. And that trend has continued. In 2018, we were the first to launch a very complex firewall detection mechanism for brute force attacks. More recently (in 2022), we launched the world’s first Threat Hunting and Action Centre. It sits in the SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) category, but I would call it ‘a SOAR and much more’ because we take it beyond what the market has today. And I think that’s really what we do all the time.”
Kjaersgaard says that the breadth of Heimdal’s offering combined with technology leadership and best-of-breed solutions in certain areas within that stack (he cites DNS protection, patching, ransomware protection and rights management on the desktop) enables Heimdal to address the needs of end customers looking for a specific best of breed solution as well as those that value the convenience of a unified stack.
“The cool thing for us is there really is no alternative to this width of solution at the moment, so that’s clearly a tailwind we’re trying to tap into heavily.”
Another benefit of Heimdal’s new Managed Extended Detection and Response (XDR) Unified Security Platform, according to Kjaersgaard, is that it provides both reactive and proactive protection across multiple data sources, endpoints, networks and cloud environments.
“In this space, customers and partners typically use a managed XDR service to do their reactive protection, for example antivirus. It’s like a virus in your body. You have to take the antibiotics after you get infected. And it’s similar with an MXDR service. To get the value, you need to be infected. But with Heimdal MXDR, because it’s also a proactive suite, we can offer a much wider value stack into partners, because we can also do the patch management, we can also do the DNS security, we can also help with email security etc.. It’s very transformational for those partners because the value we supply is much greater than they can get anywhere else in the market from a SOC service.”
UK growth
In 2018, Heimdal turbo-charged its expansion in the UK through a distribution agreement with Brigantia Partners to help it reach more managed service providers (MSPs) and, through them, more end user customers.
“From there, things have snowballed. We opened an office in Leeds in 2021 with an objective to triple revenue in the UK. I think we’ve gone way beyond that. Today, the UK is our fastest growing market, not just from a percentage standpoint but from a pure revenue standpoint. And we will continue to double down in the UK market because we see a great fit there.”
He says this is not only because the UK is a large market structurally, but also because the rollout of Cyber Essentials, with its requirement for patch management, and increased governance in the NHS, including DNS security, has raised awareness about cybersecurity.
Plans for 2024
So, what can UK customers expect from Heimdal in 2024?
“We’ve got some very interesting new products coming out which will target the upper end of MSPs and open up new opportunities for lower MSP players,” said Kjaersgaard.
“We’ll be launching a privileged account and session management tool. Where an MSP operates servers for customers, typically you’d need an administrator account on that server to manage
it. What this product gives you is the ability to launch sessions into those servers just in time, which eradicates the need to have those administrator accounts resident on those servers, which of course then elevates the security posture greatly. The session management piece will be the recording of those sessions for compliance purposes, storing them and so on. This is more commonplace in the upper parts of the MSP market where larger customers will have that type of requirement. Smaller customers will have the same need, but it’s an unexplored part of the market today. That’ll be a very interesting launch that we’re targeting to get out in early 2024.
“Then we also have some RMM integrations that we’re planning to launch in 2024. RMM is something every MSP uses that offers a level of communication with their customer base, so the ability to integrate cybersecurity with that type of customer-facing communication platform will be great as well.”
World domination
In the meantime, Kjaersgaard plans to keep growing Heimdal’s global footprint.
“We have an internal saying that we want to have world domination. Maybe that’s going a bit too far, but there’s no doubt that we want to take a big chunk of the US market, which I would say is well underway. The UK market is doing really well, and we now need to start focusing on those more central European markets, DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) in particular, and then of course APAC (Asia and Pacific). In the next 10 years, building those markets out to be a big revenue stream for us will be absolutely key.”
Fantastic people
Kjaersgaard describes the journey so far, from local Danish vendor to global brand as ‘incredibly rewarding’, but picks the people who have accompanied him on that path as his greatest highlight of the last 10 years.
“We’ve seen so many incredibly bright people come through Heimdal. Some have left, some have come back again, which I think speaks to the company culture and how we retain people and give them an opportunity to grow, which you wouldn’t necessarily find anywhere else. So, if I was to highlight one thing it would be the fantastic young people we’ve seen come through, learning heaps and evolving their skill set. Just seeing people grow like that is tremendously rewarding.”
You can learn more about Heimdal’s first 10 years at https:// heimdalsecurity.com/blog/heimdal- 10th-anniversary/.
