About the Company
LightSpeed Broadband is a fast-growing Internet Service Provider based in Lincolnshire, UK. Launched in April 2021, it connected its first customer in September 2021, making it one of the UK’s fastest Alt Net companies to market.
Focused on covering underserviced areas in the country, the company currently provides services to 100,000 premises (homes and businesses) across the East of England, with plans to grow to 250,000 by the end of 2023. Its longer-term ambition is to reach 1 million premises by the end of 2025.
IT Services Manager, Darryl Mitchell, joined the company just a few months after its launch, having enjoyed over two decades in the IT industry. Reporting to the newly appointed CIO, his responsibilities span IT services, applications, security, infrastructure, and connectivity.
Previous way of operating & business limitations
In the early days of the business, LightSpeed Broadband adopted an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) approach to cybersecurity. Utilizing Windows 10 and 11, with Microsoft Defender enabled by default, the company used traditional antivirus software, such as Norton and McAfee.
“While traditional antivirus solutions have their merits, they can be very clunky and unreliable,” said Darryl. “In the past, we would crosscheck results from various antivirus solutions, which often provided very different results: one report may suggest no issues with a machine; the next would uncover thousands of infected files. It was difficult to manage, chewed up resources, and failed to provide adequate protection.”
As the company progressed from the start-up phase, and with the threat of ransomware and Zero-Day attacks at an all-time high, it was clear that LightSpeed Broadband required a more robust, sustainable, and future-proofed cybersecurity strategy.
A better way forward with Teneo
Alongside obtaining a Cyber Essentials Certification, LightSpeed Broadband began to look at new and innovative technologies that would enable them to develop a more resilient, future-proofed security posture. It was then that the company attended a demo of Deep Instinct, the world’s first and only purpose-built, deep-learning cybersecurity framework that detects and prevents malicious files in under 20 milliseconds, 750X faster than ransomware is known to encrypt.
This ensures that attacks are prevented before they execute, which is vitally important given that in just a matter of minutes, destructive ransomware has ample time to lock down patient zero, install backdoors, and begin moving laterally through the network. Deep Instinct’s prevention-first approach, ensures ransomware and other malware is prevented much earlier with greater efficacy, so that malware never executes in an environment.
Impressed by the lack of overhead required and the speed at which issues were detected and resolved, LightSpeed Broadband initially ran a short six-week PoC (Proof of Concept) across ten machines. Satisfied with the results and that the solution performed as advertised, they requested full implementation with support from Teneo.
Solution Value
In the first few weeks following implementation, Deep Instinct detected multiple issues, which were quickly resolved. Since the initial deployment and scan, the number of false positives have dramatically reduced, saving the team time.
“Fortunately, there were no nasty revelations,” said Darryl. “But our goal is not to have to determine what went wrong when a machine is infected – we want to protect against malware ever getting into our system. This is exactly what Deep Instinct does. Things are nice and tidy now, and we are confident that our cybersecurity is in a really good place.”
A lot has changed in the security space in the last few years, not least with the impact of the Russian/Ukraine war. Ransomware attacks are a constant threat to all businesses, so we wanted to focus on building a really resilient protection mechanism. After all, we knew it would be much better to invest in technology to prevent such attacks rather than have to take remedial action. 
