Silicom, an expertise for 35 years
Silicom was established in France 35 years ago. Its arrival in Canada dates back to 2020, but the entrepreneur Berthold Roth, director of all Canadian operations, brings experience and expertise on this side of the Atlantic. Silicom is headquartered in Montreal, a center where cybersecurity companies have been flourishing in recent years. With over 300 employees in France, Silicom intends to multiply those who are already hard at work in Canada.
In-Sec-M: Where does the name Silicom come from?
We have to go back to 1983 to witness the beginnings of Silicom, a company that works in computer security. It is a kind of portmanteau made up of the words Security Software and COMmunications. Arthur Bataille is the founder of Pr0f3cy, a group under which sits Silicom and its sister company, Seela.
In-Sec-M: What is your company’s mission?
Our business is built on three core expertise or pillars. The first expertise that we put forward is infrastructure. This part includes network security; for example, identity and access management. We also specialize in the entire telecommunications part- think of the security of communications and satellite networks.
Our second pillar is good governance. We can conduct audits of companies to see if they meet certain IT security standards. Are there aspects that can be improved in training, in the transfer of data between internal departments? This is where we come in.
Our third pillar is the development of security applications. It is mainly about application security, therefore securing security applications.
In-Sec-M: What sets you apart in the field of cybersecurity?
Although our arrival in Canada is recent, we have 35 years of expertise in France. We work with key clients such as the Banque Nationale de Paris, Thalès (a group specializing in aerospace and defense, in particular), the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF), to name a few. We have 85 active customers, including Airbus Cybersecurity and Airbus Defense and Space.
It is all this expertise that we bring with us when we settle in Quebec. We are currently based in Montreal, which is a cybersecurity nerve center in North America. We therefore want to be there to meet the growing needs of the market.
In-Sec-M: What would you say changed with the pandemic?
We have had a lot of requests in everything related to securing remote networks, precisely because of telework. Some companies had to quickly pivot to telework and ensure the security of data transfers, emails, etc. On the one hand, we can think of all the security of laptops, but this is only one aspect of data protection, since on the other hand, we have been called upon to secure networks.
In-Sec-M: How does In-Sec-M support you?
One of the advantages of being part of In-Sec-M is to make ourselves known to a certain network, in particular that of the provincial and federal governments. More specifically, it is to make our expertise known and to share it with key market players, both governments and private companies.