Channel Partner Case Study

IGI’s Channel Partner, BlueSky IT Partners, leverages IGI’s cybersecurity expertise to help clients solve security problems and protect themselves from cyber attacks. But, when BlueSky was the target of an attack themselves, they partnered with IGI in a whole new way. 

A Partnership Story 

IGI Cybersecurity relies on our partners to introduce our services and solutions to their customer base, while our partners rely on us to deliver professional services and solve customers’ cybersecurity challenges. 

Since becoming an IGI Channel Partner through Telarus, IGI Cybersecurity and BlueSky IT Partners have worked together on lead generation efforts, including educational roundtables hosted by IGI for BlueSky customers. Meg Toups, the Founder and CEO of BlueSky, was new to cybersecurity when they began partnering with IGI, but was able to gain knowledge and confidence in cybersecurity through these educational events. 

Meg worked with IGI National Channel Manager, Kimberly Moore, to co-host these events and drive her cybersecurity business at BlueSky. 

“Kimberly has been always very engaging. She’s always interested in how she and her team can help us be better at what we’re trying to accomplish in our company,” Meg Toups said. “She’s all about trying to help us align correctly with the customer.” 

From Partner to Customer 

With security breaches steadily on the rise, companies in every industry and of every size have the potential of being attacked—even IT providers and MSPs. 

For BlueSky, the first indication of a potential security incident was suspicious emails. At that point, Meg reached out to Kimberly for advice. The first steps: change your passwords and ensure MFA is enabled—then talk to the expert services team at IGI Cybersecurity. 

It was clear there were some bad actors that had infiltrated the BlueSky environment, so IGI began an Incident Response engagement. IGI discovered that the access point was through their email, since BlueSky had their mail hosting in DNS and the subcontractor had no antivirus function. The bad actors accessed their computers and got into the Dropbox and email. 

IGI was able to manage the incident, remove the bad actors from the environment, and perform a post-incident Penetration Test to further secure the environment. 

“IGI was very thorough, doing their due diligence to see if we had any holes in our environment and was very good at explaining it at a level that we could understand,” Toups said. 

Lasting Effects 

Their own security incident also gave them more motivation to sell cybersecurity services and solutions to customers. Seeing firsthand that an incident can happen to anyone made them realize that their customers may need security consulting too. 

“Frankly, it took us having an incident to wake up and say, ‘why aren’t we selling more security?’” Toups said. “After I got breached, I jumped in on cybersecurity.” 

Toups said they began to focus more on not only bringing cybersecurity to their customers, but also changed how they approach cybersecurity internally. In addition to the incident response and penetration test, they implemented basic security awareness training for employees and updates some policies and procedures to lower their risk, such as standardizing their laptops and creating a reporting process for suspicious activity. 

“We started educating people and told them to be suspicious,” Toups said. “We built a culture of cybersecurity.” 

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