Founded in New York in 1988, Axe Creatives specializes in helping businesses harness technology to boost productivity. The Axe team is known for delivering enterprise-level IT solutions on a small-business budget, and tailors its support to meet the unique needs of each client. By consistently putting in the time and effort needed to build trust with customers, the team has developed great IT partnerships over the years. Their services today focus heavily on security and compliance, particularly for organizations needing to meet HIPAA and HITECH requirements.

The Challenge

The risk management solution that Axe Creatives was using prior to adopting CYRISMA had lots of different features but was difficult to use and didn’t provide the desired results. In contrast, CYRISMA’s vulnerability management feature offered the ease of use and effectiveness they needed. The platform’s wider feature-set also added significant value for Axe’s end customers.

Competition from Specialized Security Service Providers: One of their larger business challenges was competition from security-only IT service providers who would regularly pitch their services to both the Axe team and their end customers. This undermined the Axe team’s role as a trusted advisor covering everything IT for their client-base.

Increasing Demand for Compliance Services: Additionally, existing customers often had compliance requirements that went beyond checklists and involved security control implementation. This meant that customers coming to them for compliance assessments would need foundational security services to actually meet their compliance requirements.

The Solution

In a recent interview, Eric Imundo and Anthony Catanzaro from Axe Creatives told us that CYRISMA’s capabilities align perfectly with the Axe team’s current vision and plans for their company. This includes an increased focus on security offerings and compliance assessments.

The platform has played a key role in helping them enhance their services, and the value they’ve received from it has consistently increased as new features have been added at no extra cost.

Tackling Competition from MSSPs and Security-Focused MSPs

The Axe team has been adding services steadily as customer needs have evolved over the years. Anthony, the IT Sales and Support Specialist at Axe, says they don’t want to be in a position where security-only service providers pitch services to their clients that they could offer on their own with the right tools. The CYRISMA platform has enabled the team to offer effective and reasonably priced security solutions to both existing clients and prospects.

Addressing Compliance Needs

With data privacy compliance requirements getting more stringent and covering a wider swathe of SMBs, particularly those in regulated industries, Axe Creatives has started to get more enquiries about compliance services. While many SMBs see this as a checkbox exercise, the Axe team has built complete solutions around compliance needs that ensure that their customers are meeting all their compliance requirements. Anthony says that CYRISMA plays a big role in helping them check all those boxes.

Cyber Insurance Eligibility

Another growing customer demand relates to cyber insurance. Often, businesses contact Axe to help with cyber insurance eligibility. In many of these cases, the insurance company does not inform or educate the SMB about insurance requirements and the controls they need to have in place to receive payouts. With CYRISMA, the Axe team can educate the customer about their risk environment, and the simple controls they need to put in place to be eligible for insurance and reduced premiums.

Affordable Security Services for SMBs

CYRISMA also enables Axe Creatives to offer security services to customers without the high costs associated with managed security. With their customer-base consisting mainly of small businesses with 25-50 users, they don’t want to offer solutions that would be beyond budget for their target market. CYRISMA’s reasonable pricing and wide feature-set enables them to act as an MSSP without burdening customers with excessive expenses.

“CYRISMA enables us to offer all these security services to customers without MSSP-level costs. By offering added value and security at a very reasonable price point, we can better serve our small business customers and stand out from the crowd.”

Eric Imundo, Solution Architect at Axe Creatives

Pricing – Security not a One-and-Done Activity

The Axe team believes that organizations need to be strategic about security planning and implementation. “Cybersecurity is not something you can accomplish in a month or two months,” says Anthony. For their security strategy to be really effective, businesses need to be ready for consistent, long-term efforts. That is why the Axe team usually bills cybersecurity services as an annual package that clients can then break up into smaller payments. This ensures incremental and ongoing improvement in security posture, taking customers from 0 to 100 with regular assessments and holistic risk management.

Continuing Improvement

In the coming months, the Axe team aims to enhance their reporting to better demonstrate the value of everything that they do behind the scenes to keep their customers secure. While they already use CYRISMA’s scan reports for remediation tracking, they plan to leverage detailed assessment reports to enrich discussions during quarterly business reviews (QBRs).

Overall, Axe Creatives finds CYRISMA to be a perfect fit for their needs, requiring minimal support while enabling them to deliver exceptional value to their clients.

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