Marks, who was most recently vice president of global channels at SentinelOne, tells CRN that he sees a ‘tremendous’ opportunity ahead for MSP and MSSP partners working with the cybersecurity vendor.

Cynomi, an MSP-focused startup whose vCISO platform is tailored toward securing small and medium-sized enterprises, announced Tuesday it has hired a veteran of the cybersecurity channel, Ken Marks, as its new chief revenue officer.

Marks, who was most recently at SentinelOne, told CRN that the move to Cynomi was prompted by the opportunity to help protect smaller organizations while also enabling MSPs to grow their businesses. He described Cynomi’s platform as “purpose-built to help MSPs build a new revenue stream.”

[Related: 10 Cool Security Tools For MSPs To Know In 2024]

“I see the opportunity now for MSPs and MSSPs to be tremendous — to not only provide vCISO services to their customers, but [Cynomi] also becomes the ‘tip of the spear,’” he said. “They can then open up opportunities to help [customers] with remediation by selling them other services and other products, to help fill any gaps that those customers may have.”

In the CRO role, Marks is now leading all go-to-market functions for Cynomi, which he noted operates a “partner-only” model and does not sell directly to customers. Cynomi’s channel chief, vice president of channel sales Royi Barnea, is now reporting to Marks.

During his career, Marks has spent more than 25 years working at major cybersecurity and networking vendors. Before joining Cynomi, he had served as vice president of global channels at SentinelOne since late 2020.

Prior to that, Marks held channel-focused roles at Silver Peak, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper and IBM.

For Cynomi, which was founded in 2020, the hire comes after the company in April announced raising $20 million in new funding led by Canaan to fuel its growth push.

Cynomi’s automated vCISO platform aims to offer equivalent capabilities to a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) tool while also going further by conducting gap analysis, creating customized policies and developing a prioritized remediation plan to ensure that cybersecurity is addressed as well.

Taking Out The Grunt Work

Kevin Baker, CISO at Fortress Security Risk Management, a Cynomi partner based in Cleveland, said that the company is proving how serious it is about growing with the help of the channel by hiring Marks.

“Bringing on board someone who has experience with a real winning platform like SentinelOne — it delights my soul,” Baker said. “It gives me a high degree of confidence that this company is going to go somewhere.”

Fortress has found major benefits through working with Cynomi over the past year, he said, particularly when it comes to reducing the amount of manual effort needed for a variety of tasks.

Cynomi “does so much of the grunt work that you can do so much more — with so many fewer people,” Baker said. “I don’t know of another application quite like it.”

Notably, Cynomi also stands out by using information gleaned from client governance, risk and compliance assessments to produce a set of security policies tailored to their specific responses, he said.

Key Priorities

As he gets underway in the role, Marks said that training and enablement for Cynomi partners will be among his biggest focus areas.

This will include building on the recent debut of Cynomi’s vCISO Academy learning platform, which he called a “great starting point” for partners.

Marks said he also expects to prioritize building out the channel team at Cynomi with additional hires.

And in terms of key partnerships, a major focus will be on working with cloud marketplace Pax8 to reach additional MSPs and MSSPs, he said.

Recruiting new partners for Cynomi is also on the agenda, Marks added.

All in all, Marks said his goal for Cynomi is to provide a clear go-to-market strategy to partners that provides massive opportunities for expansion. Within the realm of cybersecurity, “I see [vCISO] as one of the fastest-growing areas,” he said.