Cloudskope Founder: ‘You Have To Be The Most Resilient Person You Can Be’

Unexpected crises are inevitable—whether in life or career—making resilience an essential leadership ability, Cloudskope founder and CEO Dipan Mann says.

In the MSP world, resilience is about a lot more than technology, according to Cloudskope founder and CEO Dipan Mann.

Speaking to an audience of MSP executives Monday, Mann, who also serves as CTO of the Dallas-based cyber risk advisory firm, spoke about how focusing on resiliency allowed him to overcome a series of personal and professional challenges over the years.

Those included multiple potentially life-altering health crises, one of which was a medical event in 2013 that left him in a wheelchair and put his career at risk for a period of time, he said. “I became irrelevant at my job overnight,” Mann recalled during a keynote at XChange Security 2026, which is hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company and being held this week in Frisco, Texas.

[Related: Setbacks, Perseverance And Success: One MSP’s Story]

Before he could even think about his career, however, Mann was forced to push back against decisions being made about his care by his health insurer and hospital to ensure that he received proper treatment, he said.

As a result of eventually getting the treatment he needed, he was able to make essentially a full recovery from what was ultimately diagnosed as two strokes, according to Mann.

One lesson from the experience is that “you have to be the most resilient person and the most stubborn person that you can be in order to get through the crisis that’s life-altering,” he said. “If you’re not, it will consume you.”

Mann credited later getting a dog for helping to enable the recovery of both his health and career.

“Walking my dog Shadow every day was the way that I got my exercise to get back to walking and out of my wheelchair,” he said.

Mann added that, after everything he has gone through, his greatest achievement is his son, Aiden, “who gives me purpose and joy every day of my life.”

Such lessons are applicable to the many unexpected—but inevitable—crises that MSPs and MSSPs must be ready to face at any time, he said.

“Resilience in cybersecurity—and in your personal life—is about the best way that you can prove to yourself that you are made of the mettle that it takes to get through this business and through your life,” Mann said.

Without a doubt, Mann’s account of resilience in his personal and professional life was heartfelt and resonated with many of those in the audience, according to Nathan Phinney, COO of AllSafe IT, a Pasadena, Calif.-based MSP.

Despite all of the hurdles that Mann went through, “he just confronted those challenges with integrity and grit,” Phinney said.

Ultimately, he said, the truth is that “building something that matters is not a straight line”—and that is a process that will challenge you “in ways nobody warns you about.”

A second major lesson for business leaders is that they cannot manage serious incidents passively—or remotely, according to Mann.

During the response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, for instance, Mann recalled flying to New York as soon as flight restrictions were lifted to join his company’s technical team as it restored affected servers.

“You cannot lead an incident or a team in the industry that we are in from an inbox,” he said. “You have to do that from the front line.”