LBB Surevine: bringing social to security

In 2008, LBB Surevine’s founders - Stuart Murdoch (now CEO) and John Atherton (now CTO) - were working as independent consultants for a UK central government client. With their expertise in secure software engineering, they recognised a business problem. How do you encourage collaboration on sensitive information about security threats in a highly bureaucratic environment? Surevine was born. They took the principles of social technology into an organisation with the most demanding security requirements. At the time, former UK Government CIO, Ian Watmore praised the solution as “the best example of intelligent use of social technology for internal collaboration across the whole of government”.

Off the back of this initial success, Surevine won business from other departments with top-level information sensitivities. It now designs, builds and supports secure collaboration environments for a number of other UK central government clients. Their solutions enable a real-time response to cyber threats and incidents. Surevine has since attracted further praise, this time from the Prime Minister, who described Surevine as “stopping the bad stuff, while allowing the good stuff”.  One of the company’s biggest references is CISP (Cyber Information Security partnership), which it developed alongside the Cabinet Office (and was described by the Financial Times as Secure Facebook for Cyber Threats).

The secret of Surevine’s success appears to be providing an intuitive and engaging User Experience which actively promotes participation and enables strong cyber threat situational awareness. One of Surevine’s ‘tricks’ has been to ensure an even balance of employees; for every one recruit with a strong central government/defence/intelligence background, it makes sure it recruits one with a web development mindset. There’s still room to grow in the central government market. But Surevine has also identified opportunities in other verticals and geographies. Already there is interest from blue light organisations, the finance sector (another industry where certain types of sharing have to be controlled), and Five Eyes countries (defence information sharing). There’s much to play for.

More to follow for subscribers in our Little British Battlers report out in a few weeks’ time.

Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '09:05' - Tagged: socialmedia   lbb   security