30 Years of Verve Industrial Protection

2023 marks 30 years of business for Verve Industrial Protection. This anniversary is a major milestone for many reasons. As we look back on where we came from, where we are now, and what our future holds, we have a lot to proud of, but realize there is still a lot of work to do. We remain at the center of a thriving industry where we continue to learn, adapt, and enhance our capabilities.

Our History

Born in the early 1990s as an industrial engineering services company known as RKNEAL, our focus on vendor-neutral control system automation provided a unique solution for customers in the power, water, and manufacturing industries.

As we became subject matter experts on all major DCS and PLCs in the market, we expanded our reliability capabilities to offer managed services focused on real-time data historians, as well as smart and optimized process control.

2003 brought advancements in technology that allowed us to develop components on control systems that would later become the benchmark architecture for our flagship Verve Security Center. These components included asset discovery, backups, change management, patching, and logging in an OT environment on all major DCS and PLC platforms.

A few years later, NERC CIP was passed and enforced as the first ICS cybersecurity compliance regime in North America. We stepped in to help Fortune 100 companies protect their industrial control systems with network segmentation, secure remote access, and enterprise firewall installations. We quickly became a trusted advisor and resource for IT security groups to consult with to understand how to secure OT environments.

Cultivated from 14 years of experience in control system environments and proven tool deployments, the Verve Security Center launched in 2008 to address NERC CIP compliance requirements.

In 2017, RKNEAL rebranded as Verve Industrial Protection to emphasize the growing importance of ICS/OT cybersecurity with our vast 20+ years of control systems expertise. Our geographic expansion reached global markets as we gained new offices, resources, and customers across the United States and European regions.

With the rise of CIS 20 and other regulation requirements, demand for industrial cybersecurity continued. As we launched v 8.0 of the Verve Security Center in 2020, it marked our service to 100 customers across five continents and six major industry verticals. We compete against some of the largest security vendors with 90%+ success ratios as we replace out-of-date solutions with our vendor-agnostic endpoint management approach.

Our Present

In 2023, we reflect on the continued success and advancement of our people, technology and firm. During the rebranding and leadership change of Verve Industrial, CEO John Livingston laid out our core value and mission into three pillars:

• To serve our clients by significantly improving the reliability and security of their industrial control systems
• To build a firm that is greater than the contributions of individual people or single service offerings
• To develop leaders by creating a platform that allows each person (internally and externally) to grow and expand their personal capabilities

Every company has a mission. But bringing this mission to life in every aspect of the company is where Verve excels. Looking back on years of success, these organizational and cultural elements play a significant role in the way we do business. Customer feedback is a key component to shaping our product and has provided invaluable insight into their day-to-day needs, challenges, and objectives. We believe the key to protecting the world’s most critical infrastructure will come from driving operational efficiency and focus to the security mission. The single biggest gap organizations have is available resources. Verve’s focus is to enable organizations to achieve a high security ROI on resource investment.

From the product to the improvement of a customer’s cybersecurity posture and maturity, it is all driven from within. The group of talented individuals that work at Verve showcase their leadership, innovation, and collaboration to push each other to higher standards and achievements. Fostering a synergetic work environment allows for critical and creative thinking, investment in roles that contribute to “the big picture”, and personal and professional progress.

Similarly, partnering with our customers to enable their effectiveness and efficiency, we improve their stature within their organization as a valued team member who drives performance and productivity across the OT cybersecurity function.

As a 30-year-old company in a 20-year-old industry, our roots are well entrenched into the early days of NERC CIP and Stuxnet when the industry first got its start. We’ve worked across thousands of different OT sites and dozens of clients across the globe in various industries from power, oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, water & waste, etc.

Our triple digit growth is a direct reflection of the increased awareness and need for OT cybersecurity, the commitment and drive from Verve’s team to help our clients meet their growing OT cyber challenges, and the clients who continue to trust us to inform, assist, and improve their OT security and reliability.

Our Future

Verve’s heritage is our strength. Verve is based on delivering for one client and then being referred to additional clients to assist them. This heritage in deep OT knowledge, client commitment, and driving OT cybersecurity efficiency will also be our future. Verve’s development team continues to innovate new ways to help clients prioritize the range of risks and threats to their environments by providing practical recommendations, rather than just alerts. This client impact is contingent on our ability to attract and retain the best talent in the industry – not just from those who have been around OT security for years, but finding new talent in different arenas to grow the pool of OT security resources for the industry.