Trustwave opens Waterloo office, strengthens ties with Rogers Communications

Global security firm Trustwave has opened a new office in Waterloo, Ontario, announced a new wave of hiring, and added a new country manager, Michael Sims, to oversee the company’s Canadian operations.

Trustwave had previously leased an approximately 850 square metre space in Cambridge, Ontario.
Trustwave’s new approximately 1,050 square metre office can support approximately 90 employees, and features an Advanced Security Operations Centre (ASOC) through which Trustwave delivers managed security services to clients headquartered in Canada, as well as multi-national corporations with operations in the Waterloo region.

“As one of the industry’s leading and fastest-growing cybersecurity and managed security services providers, Trustwave needed the extra space to support our current team and the massive hiring we’re doing in the Waterloo area,” said Sims, who previously held positions at CSDC Systems, Xyratex/Seagate, Sun Microsystem and IBM. “The new Canadian office is an innovative high-tech space that appeals to existing employees and will support our aggressive hiring goals in the region.”

Sims joined Trustwave in April 2016, after serving as Canadian Country Manager for Optiv Security, where he oversaw that company’s go-to-market strategy for managed security services and other offerings.

He’s a graduate of Guelph University’s Management Economics Program, and has served on the board of directors for Canaire Inc, as well as serving as a school board trustee, and was founding President of Grand River Mustangs Girls Hockey.

Trustwave is on an aggressive hiring spree, looking to add approximately 30 new employees to the 65 already employed in their Canadian office.

The company is looking to fill a variety of roles, from sales and marketing and threat analysis to software engineering and security consultation, in order to complement their existing workforce, which consists of security analysts, ethical hackers, forensic investigators, researchers, engineers, sales and support staff who develop Trustwave’s cybersecurity technologies and managed security services.
In December, Trustwave announced a partnership with Rogers Communications, offering a portfolio of cybersecurity solutions, called leapfrog, to help Canadian small-to-medium businesses detect and combat global cyber-attacks.

Rogers now offers Trustwave Managed Security Services as part of its cybersecurity-as-a-service offerings.

The third annual Trustwave 2016 Security Pressures Report surveyed 1,414 security professionals worldwide, including 210 Canadian IT professionals, and found that 63% of them felt increased pressure to secure their organization in 2015.

Apart from the usual cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities, IT professionals are up against the willingness of companies to spend appropriate resources on IT security issues.

Globally, the IT professionals surveyed rated customer data theft as their top worrying outcome of an attack or data breach, no surprise in the wake of several high-profile security breaches in the media recently.

Canadian IT professionals, meanwhile, wished for increased budget as their top priority for 2016, and the survey also found that Canadian IT professionals are twice as concerned about losing the respect of their peers in the wake of a data breach, compared with their global peers, which is a national cliché that’s at least slightly reassuring.

Trustwave is headquartered in Chicago, and has customers in 96 countries.