Top MSSP iON Is Independent Again, Plans To Continue On Fast Growth Path

“I’m the happiest guy in North America,” says iON founder and CEO Robert Zagorsky. “This allows us to continue on our predictable growth path without any distractions.”

Robert Zagorsky, the founder and CEO of iON United Inc., one of the premier MSSPs in North America, could not be more excited about the future now that he and his brother, Scott, have regained ownership of the company they founded 23 years ago.

“I’m the happiest guy in North America,” said Zagorsky in an interview with CRN, speaking about separating from Fulcrum IT Partners, a Canadian solution provider holding company, in February of this year. “This allows us to continue on our predictable growth path without any distractions. It gives us the freedom, financial independence, and autonomy to reinvest in our services and the iON team.”

Now that he and his brother have bought the company back, Zagorsky said the time is right for the Calgary, Alberta-headquartered company, a CRN Triple Crown winner, to expand its service offerings and capabilities and to continue its national growth strategy in Canada and beyond.

“With the exceptional security talent we’ve built across Canada, the sky is the limit,” said Zagorsky, who is one of the early pioneers in the cybersecurity market. “We have continuously grown the business every year for the last 23 years. We will continue doubling down on our unwavering strategy to provide security thought-leadership for our customers, protecting the most recognizable and largest companies in Canada.We’re making investments to drive growth both organically and through future acquisitions.”

Zagorsky said that iON outperformed expectations and doubled its revenue while under Fulcrum. He said the original Fulcrum deal – which allowed the company to keep its brand as a cybersecurity leader – was intended to provide additional capital to fuel acquisitions across Canada which never came to fruition.

Fulcrum declined to comment.

Zagorsky said bringing the company back under its original ownership gives him and his team the financial freedom to once again continue the national expansion he began in Canada when he acquired Wirefire Solutions in 2021 - a Vancouver-based cybersecurity solution provider – the year before the Fulcrum acquisition in 2022.

“Our national strategy has never wavered,” he said. “Our intent in acquiring Wirefire and then expanding nationally by opening our Toronto office in 2024 continued. With numerous new customers nationally over the past two years, we continue to execute on our original strategy and now we have the financial certainty to continue down this path.”

Investing More In Additional Managed Services

Now that Zagorsky and his team continue to drive the strategy and operations, Zagorsky said he is excited to invest more into the company to add additional managed services and to attract more customers to the company’s scalable enterprise security platform.

“We will continue to make big investments to service the rapidly emerging needs around operational technology, AI and data governance,” said Zagorsky. “Our customers have embraced these investments which propel our growth. This growth is built on the foundation of our talented team and our highly valued, differentiated services including next-gen network security, exposure and vulnerability management and advanced offensive security. We are taking everything we have learned in responding to the largest breaches in Canada to provide real-time incident response for our customers. We are building a preventive framework for all companies.”

At the same time, the company is doubling down on its mainstay technology partnerships including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, CrowdStrike, Wiz and Cloudflare, said Zagorsky. “They all have been critical to our success,” he said.

iON’s “market relevance and differentiated strategy is the result of always putting the customer first, which remains the DNA of the company,” said Zagorsky.

“Our reputation as the cybersecurity leader protecting the biggest brands in Canada has never been stronger,” he said. “That is a result of the trust we have built with those brands over 23 years. We are the company that stands with and behind our customers. That is why we trademarked the tagline: ‘We protect the brands you know.’ We have prided ourselves from the beginning on staying close to our customers. That has always pointed us to designing new services and solutions to meet our customer’s requirements, as we expand our extremely talented team.This isn’t a business where we are producing widgets at scale; our products are our people.”

One of the keys to staying close to customers, Zagorsky said, are a series of curated iON events including its flagship iON iCONIC cybersecurity conference, which features a full day of “real world” insights from iON’s cybersecurity leaders with customers from across Canada.

The event – which this year is being held on April 30 at the Fairmont Royal York in Toronto – has become a must-attend for iON’s top customers anxious to learn from one another as they tackle head on the security challenges facing their companies, said Zagorsky.

“The conference informs enterprise CISOs where the security industry is evolving,” he said. “That is what we have been doing since we founded the company. CISOs tell us time and time again that this helps them refine their strategy. What we love about iCONIC is hearing from our customers about how they appreciate what we are doing to help them collaborate with peers and our partners to keep their companies secure.”

Looking ahead, Zagorsky said he and his brother are determined to remain true to the values instilled in them early in life through growing up and working on a farm – experiences that shaped their strong work-ethic during their formative years.“We bring trust, integrity, no ego, laughter and humanity to the business each and every day,” he said. “We never lost sight of those values and we never will.”