Protect Your Team’s Activity With Devolutions All-In-One Security Suite

Devolutions is a complete product suite that helps IT professionals, mainly SMBs and IT departments in larger organizations, to control, manage and centralize access to different assets or departments, passwords, and remote access, all in one single platform. In this interview, CEO David Hervieux portrays the unique advantages of Devolutions and offers affordable security solutions for SMBs.

In a nutshell, what is Devolutions all about?

We believe that when it comes to cybersecurity, smaller organizations have the same kind of challenges as larger organizations do, and we want to help democratize those technologies for smaller organizations that have less time, budget, and resources for such solutions.

We see a lot of enterprise solutions being deployed in smaller organizations. They buy these solutions thinking that they just got the best deal ever, but when it’s time to deploy, it just never comes to completion. They end up shelving many of the features because they lack the human resources to activate them.

We offer affordable, easy-to-use, easy to deploy, and robust solutions that have the same power as those larger competitors but are designed to fit into the small business environment.

Our market is mainly in the US and Europe. We have more than 130 employees located just outside of Montreal.

What are some of the solutions you offer for SMBs?

Our flagship software, Remote Desktop Manager, is used by more than 800,000 users to centralize and consolidate all their different remote connections and accesses.

Password Hub, our cloud-based password management solution for IT professionals is particularly useful if you work in an environment where you need to share passwords, whether it be for Twitter and Facebook or your project management platform.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have our Devolutions Server, which is our on-premise privileged accounts and access management platform, intended for IT and security professionals.

You need a solution to manage passwords on social media platforms, but you cannot use the same solution when it comes to maintaining a production server for the Bank of America because it’s not intended for the same kind of users and doesn’t have the same level of security. One is pretty easy to use while the other is complex by design because you want to secure those entries as much as you can. You can even go down to recording user sessions and see what people are doing on the platform once they are granted access.

These three different solutions work hand in hand and talk to each other. We can provide them as a whole platform or independently, depending on the needs of the customer.

Here’s a quick introductions to the Devolutions interface:

How do you help customers decide what type of solutions they actually need?

There are a lot of major hacks happening right now in cybersecurity. People from smaller organizations used to think that they weren’t being targeted by hackers, but now, with ransomware and all the phishing campaigns, SMBs are waking up to the fact that it could happen to them as well. They need to know there’s a solution for them on the market that has the right pricing model and the right core feature set that they need to maximize their security. They can do a three-four fold on what they have right now, and that’s the main point that we need to educate smaller organizations about.

When they contact our team of experts, we take them by the hand and tell them exactly which components apply to them and which ones don’t, depending on what they are trying to achieve.

Oftentimes, people would read something from Gartner, for example, not fully understanding the report and thinking of solutions like privileged access management as something that is only intended for large organizations.

We need to find the right way to get our message out there while competing against larger organizations with much larger marketing budgets, but we don’t need to educate organizations on these specific solutions. They just need to know that there’s a market out there that is customized for their cybersecurity needs.

In such a competitive market, what makes Devolutions unique?

We’ve become a one-stop-shop for everything password and access management for SMBs. Small organizations, who don’t have the same kind of resources that a larger enterprise might have, benefit from having all those different solutions in one place and dealing with just a single vendor. That is a great advantage for them if they don’t have to deal with different vendors for those different solutions.

Of course, if you’re the US Army and you want to protect your ultra-secret assets in China, we’re probably not the right company for that. But if you’re a small or medium business and you’re looking for a cybersecurity solution to manage remote access and passwords, Devolutions will have everything you need.

Devolutions is quick and easy to deploy. It takes from two days up to two weeks. You don’t have to hire someone to deploy Devolutions. Our pricing model can fit any budget.

The core features that Devolutions offers are very robust. We make sure that you have the right product in place that is as good as what you would get when you pay hundreds or thousands of dollars. We may not have the same feature set, but that’s fine because more often than not, when you spend 200,000 dollars on a highly secure password management solution, you end up only using 10% of that feature set. That 10% is what we focus on as a company, and we do it really well.

What would you say are the most essential first steps to secure an SMB?

You need to centralize the data in a secure database so that you get better visibility on what’s happening in your business. Five years ago, people started using all kinds of password management solutions, but they didn’t have good visibility, so they needed to centralize all the different entities in one single solution in case someone lost their password.

So, step one, centralize your assets. Step two, figure out who needs access to what to complete their job. You cannot let people have full admin rights on all the different entries when all they need is a read-only profile. So, you need to centralize all the different assets, control who has access to what, and then have visibility on who accessed what and when. These are the two major steps to follow.

What do you do to maintain user privacy on your platform?

We play by the same rules as everyone else. Our solutions are as secure in terms of features as larger organizations. For example, our password hub solution is Soc2 compliant. We also have ISO 27 001 certification to ensure the privacy of customer information.

Smaller organizations all have the same challenges as larger ones, so we need to play by the same rules in terms of how we secure the data in our solutions and how we deal with customer information.

How do you envision the future of cybersecurity?

I think the more we move forward into the future, the more people become aware of the security challenges that smaller businesses are facing.

A lot is happening right now in our niche and we see a rise in demand for those kinds of tools. Assuming that only large organizations will be targeted is a mistake. Everyone is at risk right now, especially since Covid and the shift towards remote work. People have remote access to all kinds of different infrastructures, so we need to secure these entries.

Since last year, we’ve been surveying IT professionals to learn about their use of cybersecurity tools and password managers. It’s going to be released at the end of the year. Since this is the second year we do this, it would be really interesting to see what’s changed in the cybersecurity and IT market.