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After garnering significant interest from investors, including a nine-figure investment by private equity firm Warburg Pincus, Canada-based managed detection and response services company eSentire has restructured its C-suite in a bid to accelerate its growth in the cybersecurity field.

The company, which counts law firms as one of its key client bases, announced that Kerry Bailey, a former executive at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HP) and Verizon, will be its new CEO. Bailey replaces J. Paul Haynes, who will now serve as eSentire's president and COO.

Bailey told Legaltech News that impetus behind the C-suite change was “about bringing in a team that can help scale the business” and achieve the company's goal of “getting to a billion dollars [in revenue] of growth.”

Positioning the company for accelerated growth was the aim of Warburg Pincus, who acquired an ownership stake in eSentire in September 2017. The private equity firm met with the leadership at eSentire to put together a strategy for the company around “managing the maturity and scaling of the business, and we specifically went out and designed the organization to go to this next level,” Bailey said.

As a managed detection and response company, eSentire provides its client with an outsourced security operation center (SOC), which monitors their network traffic IT infrastructure to uncover and mitigate cyberthreats.

ESentire places network sensors in their clients' IT environments to detect anomalies that are then sent back to the SOC for analysis. The company then uses artificial intelligence, big data analytics and other technologies to interpret the data it collects.

The growth of eSentire has been aided in no small part by its law firm clientele. In August 2017, then-CEO Haynes told Legaltech News noted that legal was one of the “fastest-growing” sectors for the company.

Bailey noted that currently, eSentire's focus is on “mid-market firms” and other mid-market companies for whom cyberthreats are “outpacing their ability” to address them. While he believes this “mid-market vertical will continue to be a focus” for eSentire,  “you will also see us focus higher up the market” on large enterprise clients as well.

Bailey joins eSentire after years in IT and cybersecurity. Previously, he sold a cybersecurity company to Verizon, where he worked in a variety of roles including in its security solutions unit and cloud strategy and data services business. Berry moved to Hewlett-Packard in similar positions.

He noted that working in tech and telecommunications companies exposed him to how the market was transforming to a “new style of IT” that was far more challenging to secure.

The advent of cloud services and cloud-based application and software, he explained, has expanded the threat environment for many companies, and made it more difficult to monitor one's IT resources completely.

“The old way of security was just saying, 'If I know that threats are out there, I will monitor and detect them,'” Bailey said. On the other hand, “the new world we operate in is not knowing what or where the threat is.”