Aviva Zacks
What a wonderful opportunity Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives had to interview Joe Stornelli, Principal and Founder of JS Tech. She asked him about his company’s “everything is a service” policy.
Safety Detectives: What got you started in your business?
Joe Stornelli: I started my business when I was very young, and we were initially a device-based business where we would fix PCs and Macs. We came into the enterprise space because our clients were looking for people to work in their businesses. The moment we got there, we realized that there was a big gap in the cybersecurity space, especially in the medical field where we began. Our biggest client was a chain of doctors’ offices—chiropractic PMR. Everyone suddenly decided that cybersecurity was important in that industry in part because it was being mandated, and when you took a look at some of these mandates and where these firms stacked up, they were missing the mark. So, HIPAA was the catalyst for me to get into cybersecurity.
SD: What was the motivation for starting JS Tech?
JS: This company has grown and evolved over 10 years. I started it when I was in my dorm room and wanted to be a part of the New York City commercial scene. I thought that the way I could do that was by providing support to individuals, mainly students, and giving them affordable computer repair that came to their dorm. As it turns out, it grew, and that’s how we ended up eventually being security practitioners. Now we serve small and medium businesses that make their imprint on the fabric of New York City.
Our newest mandate is that we’re not going to just offer desktop support; we want to have clients that benefit from our deep knowledge in production technologies and security technologies. We want to leave our imprint on companies and do work that only we, and a handful of other skilled firms, can do in New York.
SD: Can you tell me about some of your company’s services that you offer?
JS: Our model is “everything is a service.” Everything is per head or per unit of size and unlimited monthlies. So, if we’re doing a deal for an antivirus for you, it’s a per head cost, which includes all the support around the system, deployment, configuration, license management, and remediation.
We do this across almost every IT service: data networking, ISPs, internet connections, servers, phones, physical layer security, access control for doors, and camera systems that are all tied to tech stack, one provider and ultimately a single point of contact for all of your IT needs.
SD: Why types of organizations use your services?
JS: We only work with organizations that have 20 people or more, in most cases. We look for companies that have been doing their own IT for some time and have realized that they can’t do it anymore. Our best client is someone who has not worked with an IT company before and who is looking to have a single point of contact, have predictable costs, and to do IT once and have it done well and not have to worry about it.
SD: What do you think is the worst cyberthreat out there today?
JS: There is a lot out there. I think CryptoLocker is a truly terrifying thing because they’re using PGP encryption. Once your data is encrypted, it is truly encrypted, and you either need to bargain with the person who has the means to decrypt it, or you need to simply say goodbye to your data and start over unless you had a good backup policy in place. So that I would say is the most terrifying.
SD: How do you think the COVID-19 pandemic is going to change cybersecurity forever?
JS: There is a certain security to being behind a corporate firewall and with IT only a few doors away. We found that people at home are actually much less reliant on IT support and providers. They tend to do things themselves, but when you lose the closeness that comes with having an organization, you also lose the constant communication. That can be good for easing the burdens of an IT department, but it can also be scary because certain things that might have been reported and investigated in the past are simply not now until they become acute. In this new COVID economy, a lot of people who work from home will simply not report it.
