To say the least this has been an exciting (and stressful) 6 months, I mean what a time to start a business! As I write this I wonder if we will look back in 6, 12 or 18 months and have forgotten what a tumultuous start 2020 had for Australia. Firstly with some of the worst bush fires in many years and then the country in full lock down as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe . In April 2020 Roy Morgan suggests unemployment is at about 15% (unheard of in my adult life) and if we aren’t already, I suspect we are heading for the first recession since the early 90’s (also not in my adult life) – but hey the glass is half full, right? Regardless we will charge on!
Back to RevolveIT – several months back Scott Jefferis and Kym Busby got together over lunch (and a beer) at a local Bendigo pub and had a discussion about starting a new Managed IT Services (or Managed Service Provider or MSP for short) venture and what that might look like for the both of us. We talked a lot in the ensuing months and came up with many ideas about how we though running a really good MSP should look like. Having both worked in the sector for many years, we both knew we had a wealth of experience in not only providing really good service but also the tools and processes we needed to develop a unique MSP offering to the local market. Having spent a lot of time looking at whats driving Information Technology and thinking about the industry as a whole it became apparent that we needed an offering in the Cyber Security space to compliment our Managed IT Services offering.
Cyber Security is nothing new, it’s always been a “thing”, we always knew that a computer needed Anti-Virus and then maybe a Firewall. Then we started getting lots of SPAM so we had another “thing” we had to block, but for a long while that was more of a productivity distraction rather than something malicious. For many businesses in the SMB sector cyber security wasn’t really something they had front of mind, it was something looked after by the IT guys and not much attention was paid to it. In my experience that changed about five years ago when we first stared seeing the first automated breaches of poorly configured Firewalls (where unauthorised people access servers via RDP) and the first prolific wave of Malware infecting systems. From there Cyber Security, Business Continuity and the organisations obligation to protect data has lead to an ever growing need to stay on top of this ever growing problem. Anyway enough of that, Ill write a separate blog entry on my thoughts on the rise of Cyber Security in SMB’s.
So anyway on the 16th of April we registered RevolveIT and went about about setting up our new company. It’s been really nice to see the support of some of our peers in the industry who not only gave their support but also called, offered advice and even put their hand up to help. I guess I really didn’t think I’d be starting a new company from scratch but here we are ready to take on the challenge.