Wanganui consultancy Cybershore bringing cyber skills to regional NZ

Wanganui-based cyber security consultancy Cybershore is seeking to harness regional cyber skills as the business grows.

Managing director Katja Feldtmann started the business in 2021, aiming to use her more than 11 years of experience in IT security and audit in New Zealand and Germany to bring greater cyber security value to businesses.

Speaking with Reseller News, Feldtmann said that as the business grows she will be looking to take on local staff.

As the perceived cyber skills shortage ramps up, bringing cyber jobs to regional New Zealand should be a priority for those with roles to fill.

She said that being flexible in your approach to hiring the right staff, as well as looking further afield than main centres, is where skill gaps can be found.

“I believe more of these jobs have to be brought to the regions because since I moved up here, I think there’s a lot of talent and people that could fill some of these jobs that are in high demand.

“There’s an apparent skill shortage – but it’s actually a limitation of people saying you have to sit in an office three days a week at least and if you can’t do that, we won’t take you.”

Feldtmann stressed that her background in audit provides a wholistic view of how security interacts with a business across the board to determine the root cause of the issue, rather than just receiving reports.

“Audit is my thing – I think most people see it like a compliance thing… but I see audit as an enabler to do things better,” she said.

“With audit, you are actually proving something is wrong, rather than just hypothetically identifying issues.”

With Feldtmann’s experience in government sector forming the key market for Cybershore, the consultancy was approved to join the all-of-government Pae Hokohoko Marketplace for IT services in August.

Open to all government agencies, the marketplace provides service catalogues and other information with the aim of simplifying the primary procurement process by linking technology partners directly to agencies.

Cybershore currently has two partnerships, reselling Canadian cloud-based governance, risk and compliance tool StandardFusion and German Microsoft 365 governance solution Rencore Governance, which can also be offered as a managed service for the commercial sector.

“[With Rencore Governance] you hook it into your Azure tenancy and it pulls out all sorts of metadata to give you a nice visual of all sorts of things” to give a big picture overview of product usage and licensing as well as security points like external users of your Teams and SharePoint files,” Feldtmann said.

These partnerships complement Cybershore’s CyberRiskCheck service – a “streamlined” current state assessment of overall IT security, providing actionable recommendations to raise it.

Feldtmann outlined the key areas in which she has seen security traditionally sit separately from wider business operations, leading to the creation of CyberRiskCheck.

“The business always feels like the security team is always just saying no, always dragging the chain, they don’t really want them to succeed and they don’t really understand what they’re doing – and the security team just thinks the business is hard to work with, just wants to not follow the rules and don’t want to hear about security.

“What is see is none of these views are really true, but these people don’t really talk, and they don’t take the time to understand each other’s work and position.

“Often, it’s politics that get in the way…. the way we do security now hasn’t been imbedded with the way the business works.”

She outlined that this disconnect often leads to the wrong tools being purchased and not properly implemented.

“It seems many organisations believe buying fancy tools is going to solve all their problems – I’ve seen this a lot. What happens is they get the tools, but the tools aren’t properly managed and they’re not even set up to meet the requirements because the requirements weren’t really well-defined to start off with.

“If you don’t somewhat centralise all your insights, risks and controls and start to automate some of that, you’re never going to get on top of it.

“That’s key for me, that business linkage, because if you don’t have that you will forever just receive reports telling you what’s wrong and you’ll never fix anything,” she continued.

She says that this is where the experience of your consultant and working with a smaller consultancy can benefit a business.

“You’re able to respond quicker to client needs – you can quickly adapt your approach,” she said.

“The key services are provided by someone who have the experience and skills… you’re not sitting there with a junior consultant that knows nothing about business. The key thing in working with us would be that you have a consultant who understands how business works.”