Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats: An Interview with Blumira’s Jim Simpson and Heidi Craun

For IT leaders at growing companies, cybersecurity can seem like an uphill battle. As your business digitalizes more assets and data, the risks expand exponentially. Yet most small and mid-sized businesses don’t have the budget for large security teams and advanced solutions.

Blumira was founded to address this gap, bringing enterprise-grade detection and response to companies that typically lack robust security postures. Blumira’s lightweight, easy-to-use system integrates smoothly with your existing stack to monitor threats across your entire digital environment.

Recently, Blumira’s CEO Jim Simpson and VP of Customer Experience Heidi Craun spoke about the unique value Blumira provides compared to traditional XDR solutions. They explained how Blumira leverages cross-team collaboration and the industry’s largest threat dataset to stay one step ahead of emerging threats.

Some key highlights from Jim and Heidi:

• Blumira focuses on solving security basics first, recognizing that most attacks target vulnerabilities in patching, phishing awareness, and other fundamental areas. “If you don’t get that done, then you’re never going to do the more complicated things,” Jim explained.
• Unlike closed XDR systems that lock you into single-vendor stacks, Blumira integrates with the solutions you already have to enhance detection and visibility. According to Jim: “The real value is the ability to synthesize information from your endpoints – the logs that are coming from all of the tools.”
• Leveraging a vast repository of cross-customer data, Blumira can rapidly build and deploy detections for novel attacks before they reach customers. As Jim stated: “We have the benefit of building on top of a large corpus of data…we can do that a lot more quickly.”
• Heidi described Blumira’s collaborative incident response process that bridges the gap between resource-strapped IT teams and Blumira’s security experts. The customer experience team helps users interpret detections, tailor monitoring, and boost internal capabilities.
• Asked what emerging threats IT leaders should watch for, Jim advocated starting with the basics: patching, phishing training, closing logging gaps. “If you get the basics done, then the complex things don’t materialize,” he stated.

For IT directors seeking advanced security without the enterprise price tag, Blumira aims to be an extension of your team. Jim and Heidi are clearly passionate about empowering lean IT teams to defend against threats through continuous education and simplifying sophisticated capabilities. If you’re looking to improve detection visibility, response workflows, and staff expertise on a budget, Blumira may be the perfect solution.

You can also view the interview transcript here.