LevelBlue Buys Trustwave To Become The ‘Largest Independent MSSP,’ CEO Says: Exclusive

‘Now with Trustwave, we’ll have hundreds of MSSP partners around the world. … We’re really looking to support our partners and provide services for them that they can’t get to market quickly enough,’ says LevelBlue CEO and former Trustwave CEO Robert McCullen.

LevelBlue, formerly telecom giant AT&T’s security business, has bought managed detection and response specialist Trustwave in a move that would make the cybersecurity “upstart” one of the largest independent, pure-play managed security service providers in the world, according to LevelBlue CEO Robert McCullen.

The deal comes on the heels of LevelBlue’s June acquisition of professional services firm Aon’s cybersecurity consulting business, formerly known as Stroz Friedberg, for its incident response chops. The two transactions will create a managed security powerhouse and expand LevelBlue’s leadership and reputation, especially among government customers, McCullen told CRN in an exclusive interview.

“With Aon and Trustwave, we’re very excited to bring them all together. We’ll be a leading provider of incident response services in the industry, and then with Trustwave, we’ll strengthen our MDR platform,” he said. “We’ve been looking for other platforms to expand our geographical presence and then also strengthen our government platform.”

The longtime tech executive, for his part, was a co-founder and CEO of Trustwave for more than 16 years.

[Related: AT&T Cybersecurity Spin-Off LevelBlue La’nches New Program To Transform Partners Into MSSPs: Exclusive]

Trustwave, a Chicago-based cybersecurity and managed security services company, offers MDR, managed security services, cyber advisory, penetration testing, database security and email security offerings. The company earlier this year earned full authorized status by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), adding to its

existing StateRAMP authorization.

The acquisition will bring together LevelBlue’s strategic risk management expertise and cybersecurity infrastructure with Trustwave’s Fusion platform and cloud-native MDR service. The offering provides 24x7 cybersecurity protection for organizations worldwide, the two companies said.

Enterprises will benefit from increased unprecedented visibility and control over how security resources are provisioned, monitored and managed across any environment, according to LevelBlue. The combined portfolios will also establish a unified managed defense platform, supported by LevelBlue’s AI threat detection platform, that can work across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments, the Dallas-based company said.

Trustwave’s recent FedRAMP authorization was especially appealing to LevelBlue, McCullen said. LevelBlue, which already has government customers thanks to its relationship with telecom mainstay AT&T, will now meet the requirements for the U.S. Department of Defense, for example.

“It’ll certainly strengthen our capabilities between incident response, which a lot of times leads to MDR opportunities, and then us having FedRAMP [authorization] is unique in the industry, so we’re very excited about that. It allows us to get back our security clearances and all those sorts of things that that we wanted to do since we [spun off from AT&T],” he said.

LevelBlue largely goes to market through the channel, McCullen said. The MSSP opportunity is growing on a global level, he added.

“Now with Trustwave, we’ll have hundreds of MSSP partners around the world, and we’ll look to strengthen those relationships,” he said. “One of the things that we have at scale is we can support any multinational account. I think that’s something that we can verticalize, not just through federal government, but also in health care and financial services. We’re really looking to support our partners and provide services for them that they can’t get to market quickly enough.”

One-year-old LevelBlue spun out from AT&T in May 2024 after entering into a joint venture with private equity firm WillJam Ventures. Thanks to its backing from one of the largest—and oldest—carriers in the country, LevelBlue at its start was one of the largest startups in the cybersecurity industry to date, with tens of thousands of customers coming over from AT&T, the company told CRN.

LevelBlue launched with more than 1,000 employees globally. Today, the company has more than 2,500 employees, including the Trustwave team that has joined LevelBlue.