The 2022 Fastest Growing Firms: Coalfire

Number of Billable Consultants: 710

Client Industries Served: Cybersecurity

Website URL: https://www.coalfire.com

As the largest global firm dedicated to cybersecurity, Coalfire delivers a full lifecycle of solutions through professional services, technology platforms, and managed services to help organizations solve their toughest cyber challenges. Coalfire combines extensive cloud expertise, advanced technology, and innovative approaches to fuel cyber success.

Consulting: What were the main factors that contributed to your firm's exceptional growth?

Kehoe: We've been consistently improving security outcomes since 2001, and by elevating automation and mission-critical adversary operations this year and last, we've taken the organization to the next level with new and improved services, products, partnerships and acquisitions.

As the cybersecurity market expands, so have our solutions. This year we launched Compliance Essentials – our next generation compliance automation platform backed by 600 assessors and advisors with more than 1 million hours of compliance experience. It revolutionizes cyber compliance by managing compliance, assessments and risk more efficiently, and supports more than 4x the frameworks of other industry compliance automation tools. We also launched FastRAMP 360 that enables clients to be audit ready in less than three months instead of the industry average of 18 months. This is a continuation of our industry leading FedRAMP solutions, as we have assessed more than half the market. To date, our submitted Coalfire builds have a 100% success rate in obtaining ATOs.

Additionally, advancing our managed services offering contributed to our exceptional growth. Cybersecurity talent is scarce and expensive and organizations find it challenging to get enough (and the right) talent. This past year we expanded managed services by 300%, supporting over 500 clients with leading threat and vulnerability management and cloud services, further helping organizations address their missing technical skills without needing to hire or increase overhead.

All of this growth is not possible, of course, without a skilled workforce. We are privileged to have the best and brightest on our team. In terms of workplace investment, we expanded employee benefits for mental health, health care, compensation and more, including an enhanced parental leave policy. We continued to focus on work-life flexibility and employee well-being as we navigated the COVID-19 pandemic, encouraging employees to flex their schedules as needed and permitting remote work for all employees – perks we still uphold post-pandemic. Additionally, we continued to focus on diversity and inclusion, adding new employee resource groups to offer employees a supportive community to connect with.

With expanded service offerings and a healthy, thriving company culture, Coalfire grew 30% over the year, reaching over 1,000 employees and serving over 1,800 clients across multiple industries.

Consulting: How would you say you've managed to maintain growth during the unprecedented past three years?

Kehoe: While the pandemic and its aftermath resulted in decreased demand for many products and services on the market, the need for cybersecurity only increased. Not only that, but the growing political tensions around the world this year has created a melting pot of cybersecurity concerns. Threat actors are constantly changing their tactics, so our pen testing services and compliance solutions are really moving the needle with our clients.

Consulting: How is this year shaping up for your firm?

Kehoe: Evolving security threats around the world demand organizations to pivot to protect themselves against rising threat actors. In light of this, Coalfire strengthened and added new and improved professional services and products in our core focus areas throughout 2022.

We also recently launched new capabilities for our attack surface management, application security and development security operations. These enhancements provide our clients with actionable intelligence and new platforms that address security concerns throughout the lifecycle of technology and product development. Security professionals aren't traditionally a part of the conversations between product managers, developers and creatives. Security then falls through the cracks, forcing organizations to overhaul resources and time to remediate. With extensive experience in both security testing and development, our consultants add immediate value right from the start. They help clients understand and prioritize output from the various tools implemented, and act as a sounding board on the potential impact of code fixes and new features. This capability sets clients up for success and accelerates their time to market. With these high-value services, Coalfire has made a lasting impact on clients' business this year and will continue to do so.

As we lean into a subscription-based model, providing dynamic, flexible, and continuous solutions for complex cybersecurity challenges, we have scaled and streamlined professional services and processes across the board, delivering industry-leading capabilities.

Helping clients achieve up to a 429% ROI in the first year after building a secure, compliant environment doesn't hurt either.

Consulting: How would you describe your firm's outlook for 2023? Where do you see the most opportunities?

Kehoe: As evolving threats endanger the business ecosystem and international conflicts continue to emerge, there will be increased demand for cybersecurity services around the world. The security point-in-time mindset is long gone and managed services are here to stay. Security needs to be addressed, checked and assessed continually. However, it requires a significant operational burden to do it successfully. We expect to continue our innovations in focus areas like offensive security, compliance and cloud security, delivering client-friendly solutions that offer expertise and powerful technology.

Consulting: What would you say are your firm's biggest challenges in 2023?

Kehoe: People are the best defense when it comes to cybersecurity. The biggest challenge will be ensuring our growing team stays engaged and is equipped with the skills and tools they need to thrive. To address this, we're focused on finding ways to automate manual work and drive efficiency, encouraging team members to take time off to rest and recharge under our flexible time-off policy. We're also exploring new benefits, programs, and initiatives to better support our people, freeing up space and enabling them to do what they do best – keeping our clients safe.

Consulting: What does being named one of Consulting's Fastest Growing Firms mean to your firm, your employees and your clients?

Kehoe: Receiving this recognition is an added benefit to a fruitful year! Our team members work very hard to keep Coalfire at the forefront of the industry, providing phenomenal service and leading the company and our clients to continued success. It is great to bring home this award to show that their work is seen, appreciated and recognized. The award offers additional visibility – showing our clients and prospects how fast we are growing because of our expanded capabilities and agile mindset.