AgileBlue expands advisory arm to guide mid-market security decisions

AgileBlue's Strategic Advisory Group grew out of a pattern the company kept seeing among mid-market clients. These organizations already owned capable security tools, yet lacked anyone with the time and expertise to act on what those tools reported and to decide which threats mattered most. The Cleveland company built the advisory group to fill that role, pairing its artificial intelligence-native security platform with human guidance for organizations that larger vendors tend to overlook.

Many of those companies have already spent on capable security products and still struggle to act on what those products tell them. "Most of our clients don't have a tool problem. They have a decisions problem," said senior security consultant Andrew Desender. "They've bought good products, but nobody has the time to sit with the output and say, this is what matters and this is what we fix first."

It is a segment AgileBlue argues has been underserved for years. Large enterprises draw the bulk of vendor attention and can afford full in-house teams, while smaller organizations face the same sophisticated threats on tighter budgets. The strategic advisory group aims to fill that gap with fractional support, giving companies seasoned guidance rather than the cost of a full security leadership bench.

The pressure is sharper in a state still building the ecosystem around its technology companies. Tony Pietrocola, co-founder and president of AgileBlue, noted that Ohio's challenges mostly mirror the rest of the country, with local exceptions in two areas: the capital available to fund new innovations and the talent to grow the industries around them. Remote work has eased the talent gap in recent years, he explained, though a local shortage persists despite the strength of Ohio's universities. Funding is the tougher problem. "There have been some green shoots developing to solve this but they are moving slowly," he said.

AgileBlue's platform anchors the offering. It pulls data from sources such as Microsoft environments, firewalls and email gateways, then uses AI to correlate those feeds and flag suspicious activity in real time. When something looks wrong, automated playbooks can isolate an affected host while analysts investigate. The strategic advisory group extends that reach into territory the software alone cannot cover, including vulnerability management and user awareness training.

AgileBlue starts each engagement with the business rather than the technology. The first move is to map a client's critical processes, regulatory obligations and appetite for risk, then align security spending with what actually matters to the operation. The firm leans on tabletop exercises to test those assumptions, and they sometimes upend them.

In one engagement, the client came in assuming its information technology (IT) systems, the email, the servers, the office network, were where a breach would do the most damage, and expected the security plan to concentrate there. Walking through the scenario together surfaced a different exposure. The operational technology (OT) running the client's core operations had the greater risk, and a compromise on that side would hit the functions the business actually depends on to run. The exercise shifted the priority, steering protection and investment toward the OT environment rather than defaulting to the systems everyone assumed mattered most.

AgileBlue also emphasizes communication. Having watched enterprise software projects collapse when clients and contractors talk past each other, Desender explained that the firm states its assumptions openly and invites clients to push back, an approach he credits with cutting wasted effort and producing solutions that fit a client's specific needs.

The company is measured about where AI fits into that work, treating it as a tool whose value depends on the skill of the person using it. "AI is only as good as the person using it. When I use it, it reflects my own knowledge back at me," Desender said. "Put it in the hands of someone who doesn't understand what they're building, and you get an application full of holes they'll never see." He points to attackers already using AI on offense, including a power plant intrusion where early AI models helped map the facility's systems.

Even so, AgileBlue holds that the fundamentals still decide most outcomes. Vulnerabilities on the scale of Heartbleed and the SolarWinds compromise show how severe the risks remain. Rather than chase every alert, the company favors a risk-based approach, leaning on frameworks such as the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog and Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) scores to concentrate on the flaws most likely to be exploited.

When an incident does hit, the guidance is to slow down. Desender compares the moment to scuba diving. "Stop, breathe, think, then act," he said, a discipline meant to head off panic-driven mistakes. He cited a company that wiped a computer over a single poisoned online ad, an overreaction that cost hours of downtime and labor when a measured response would have settled it. Testing incident response plans (IRPs) on a regular schedule, he added, keeps them current and keeps teams calm when something real happens.

Most clients still come to AgileBlue reacting to a regulation or an incident already underway. The company would rather engage earlier, while an organization still has time to strengthen its security posture and prepare for risks ahead, including those tied to AI, rather than waiting until an incident forces a response.