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PARTNER TESTIMONIAL
Cédric Langlasse,
Director of Partnerships for Mailinblack
1- Could you briefly introduce yourself: who are you? What is your job ? How long have you been working for Mailinblack?
"I'm Cédric Langlasse, and I'm Director of Partnerships at Mailinblack, and I joined the team in 2020. "
2- Could you introduce us to Mailinblack?
"Mailinblack is a French developer of cybersecurity solutions. The company has been in existence for over 20 years now, and we protect all organisations in France, whether public or private.
We have more than 22,000 customers, mostly in France, and we help these companies to protect themselves in the face of an alarming fact: 90% of cyber attacks are the result of human error.
What exactly is human error? It's the misuse of passwords, such as compromised passwords or duplicate passwords. Human error also means users clicking on malicious links in their emails, or simply a lack of training and awareness of cyber security.
So we're going to enable organisations, and our partners, to offer protection solutions that take all these elements into account, the whole area of user protection.
Historically, we've been known for our email protection solution (you're probably familiar with our authentication technique: when you first make contact with a Mailinblack user, you're asked to type the word written in colour in order to deliver your email). This solution, Protect, allows our users to filter their email, to make it both clean and secure, using different technologies and different features.
For example, we use anti-virus engines, anti-spam solutions and anti-phishing solutions. We also use artificial intelligence, directly integrated into the solution. This Protect offering is one of the most robust solutions currently on the market.
However, this functionality is just the top of the iceberg: it's an extra layer of security, a touch of comfort. What's more, this feature is optional: our customers and partners can choose whether or not to take it up, whether or not to activate it.
Indeed, it's often this solution that we're known and recognised for.
However, over the last few years, with the explosion in cyber attacks, we've turned our attention to more comprehensive user protection, and have expanded our catalogue to include 4 solutions, enabling us to offer more comprehensive protection, a more global offering.
This offering is called U-Cyber 360, and it's a much more comprehensive offering, focusing on user protection. It includes email protection, but also a password manager called Sikker. Sikker enables you to secure your passwords and save and share them in complete security.
Through this U-Cyber 360 offering, we are also proposing a cybersecurity awareness solution: Cyber Coach. This involves simulating computer attacks to raise awareness among an organisation's employees in real time. Finally, the fourth solution in this U-Cyber 360 offering, called Cyber Academy, is an e-learning platform that uses different modules to instil the right IT security reflexes in each user (concerning, for example, remote connection, data management, password management, of course, but also email management, etc.). This Cyber Academy solution raises users' awareness of everything to do with IT security."
3- Who are your clients?
"We currently have 22,000 customers, so we can work with any type of customer in any business sector, for the simple reason that IT security concerns everyone, from the moment you have an email inbox.
Whether you're a multinational, a craftsman or an entrepreneur, as soon as you use email, you're affected by IT security issues.
We therefore work with all types of customer, from 1 email address (one user) to more than 20 or 30,000 email addresses (and therefore as many users) for large local authorities or hospitals, for example.
When Mailinblack was launched, we were mainly targeting very small businesses. Now, thanks to all the new features we've put in place, and after making our solution much more robust, we're reaching much larger customer segments, be they VSEs, SMEs or major accounts.
In terms of business sectors, we operate in both the public and private sectors. For example, we currently protect more than 300 health establishments. We know that health establishments have very sensitive data, and that the need for protection is all the greater.
The situation is also similar with town halls and local authorities, and with the Olympic Games coming up, we're already starting to see a fair number of attacks on town halls.
We also have a strong presence in the industrial sector, just about everywhere in France, and thanks to our partners and resellers, we have a strong network throughout France."
4- What is the added value for your offer?
"In my opinion, there are several reasons for this.
The first, and one we're proud of, is that we're a French company, based in Marseille. Very few publishers of cybersecurity products operate in France. That's something we're proud of, because we develop and host our solutions in France.
We also have a fairly strong ecosystem. And indeed, when we talk about the public sector, we clearly understand the importance of being able to equip publishers with French solutions hosted in France: so that's the first point.
The second point, and I think this is the most important, is that we have focused our offering around the user, which means we have a perfectly clear offering for both end customers and resellers.
In this way, we enable an IT service provider to have a complete user protection offering from a single vendor, Mailinblack. This avoids, for example, having to buy a password manager from one vendor, then a user awareness solution from another, and so on.
At Mailinblack, we make it possible to harmonise all this, in particular through a partner portal, but also thanks to a 'cockpit', i.e. a dashboard, which centralises all the data from the 4 solutions presented above. As a result, the more solutions our end customers or service providers activate, the more comprehensive a view they get of the state of human risk in their organisation.
To give you an example, in a single company we can have a cyberscore calculated as a function, for example, of the number of mailboxes that are secure, as a function of the state of security or compromise of user passwords, as a function of the number of users trained and made aware of cybersecurity. All this will give the company a cyber score. If you realise that you have an "F" rating, you can then work out what needs to be corrected to obtain an "A" score.
This cyber score is a tool that we are proud to be able to offer our customers and partners.
So, to sum up, the three main strengths of our solution are, first of all, its sovereignty, since we are a French software publisher, and hosted in France; the completeness of all our tools, which means we can take into account the entire human risk factor; and finally, the centralisation of data relating to the organisation's cyber governance."
5- Do you have any case study to share with us?
"A client case that comes up quite often concerns companies that have put in place technological tools to protect themselves from cyber threats, but who ultimately realise that the main risk comes from the user rather than from their digital tools themselves.
You can put in place the best technological tools to secure an information system, but if a user comes along and does anything and everything, unfortunately that security is compromised.
In this context, for example, we have set up our Cyber Coach solution, which offers a vulnerability audit. The tool indicates what percentage of the company's users could potentially be trapped.
So this is a customer case that we come across regularly: customers, whether General Management or the IT Department, who want to know what their level of risk is.
In this context, we carry out a vulnerability audit, i.e. we measure the human risk in the company. The aim is to obtain the state of security at a given moment, i.e. what percentage of users are potentially at risk, so that we can raise their awareness through a tutorial. The final objective is to be able to support these users and the customer so that the level of vulnerability is as close to zero as possible.
In this case, the IT service provider plays a relatively important role. This is to be able to carry out phishing campaigns and simulations on a recurring basis.
If this work is only done once a year, it doesn't solve the training problem. It is necessary to support the end customer to ensure that users are truly aware of the issue. What is important, on the end-customer and user side, is that the user benefits from learning these new best practices, both for professional and personal use.
It's easy to imagine that if someone is trapped in their personal environment, they can also be trapped in their professional environment, and vice versa.
So, in the majority of cases, when the first campaign is set up, we can have a level of vulnerability of 20 to 25%, which is quite significant. The aim is to carry out six or eight phishing campaigns a year, on a fairly regular basis, so as to have an impact on this level of vulnerability."
6- Are you looking for new strategic and/or commercial partners?
"Yes, we're always on the lookout for new partnerships.
We currently have an ecosystem of almost 1,500 reseller partners in France who have already sold Mailinblack. So not all of them are as active as the others. Of course, if we're talking about active partners, we have between 600 and 800 partners who follow us every year, and who have customers on a regular basis.
Our aim is to strengthen this network of partners and distributors. This year, we're also moving in a direction that will focus more and more on direct distribution via our partners.
We're looking for partners who really want to play the game with us, who want to get involved and offer our complete user package.
We have partners who only offer a single solution, because they will package it with other things. If we can find resellers who understand our vision of cybersecurity and can offer our solution to their customers, we're obviously interested.
Our partners are mainly companies that operate in the IT sector, that are developing a cybersecurity business, and that often have a very strong national or regional network. So we mainly work with IT service providers, integrators and facilities management providers.
We are able to work with a wide range of partners.
In the near future, we will also be working with a major distributor who will be able to centralise a number of partnership requests. So we're going to be helped by this new distributor, which will enable us to focus on our core business, namely publishing software solutions, and working on improving them."
7- Is there any other information you would like to share?
"Yes, absolutely. I'd like to stress that we're proud to be able to publish solutions that are relevant to the latest developments in the sector. We are not a company with fixed solutions. We have an in-house R&D laboratory as well as an AI laboratory, which means we can constantly adapt our solutions in line with emerging cyber-attacks.
As far as our current (and future) partner network is concerned, we are also proud to be launching a new partner portal at the beginning of July. Until now, our partner portal has been a little dated, so this new portal will enable us to optimise customer management and centralise it in a single interface. The portal will have a technical section, of course, but also a sales section, so we'll be able to understand exactly which customers are using which solutions. For example, if a customer is using the email filtering solution, we will be able to see that they are receiving a lot of phishing emails. We can then suggest awareness campaigns, for example. So that's something we're very proud of, and something that will be available fairly soon."
The entire CyberSecura team would like to thank Cédric Langlasse for his testimonial!
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