Davinsi Labs

Main service(s)

Davinsi Labs is a pure-play Managed Service Provider (MSP). The company specialises in building and operating services that require retrieval and analysis of a large amount of data to generate insights and achieve digital resilience. In the security realm, Davinsi Labs delivers a managed detection and response (MDR) service, a managed vulnerability scanning service and related ad-hoc engagements such as penetration testing and attack simulation services.

Security context

It is clear to everyone that our current business landscape is highly dependent on IT. Consequently, any hiccup on the digital side of a company is likely to have an impact on the company's ability to serve customers. This is why executives in digital spend a lot of time thinking about “resilience”. How can we reduce the likelihood of impact to our systems and how can we recover quickly when something happens?

As a security person, I like the term resilience because it places security in context (along with other mishaps which harm the company) and ties it to business impact. Resilience is also the direction Davinsi Labs is taking. Its offering is guided by the question: how can we help organisations better understand what’s happening in their complex IT environments?

Services

The cornerstone service of Davinsi Labs is its mature managed detection and response service. Built on Splunk, Davinsi Labs has built their own proprietary detection library and has invested significantly in automation. Importantly, Davinsi Labs has been able to build one central MDR service. Tailoring to specific customer needs is done by building specific customer use cases on top. The centralisation allows for scalability, while the customisation allows for adaptation to the customer needs. This is a big advantage because - as many can attest - keeping both scalability and customisation in balance is not an easy task.

Next to MDR, Davinsi Labs delivers its proactive security services under the “Attack surface management” (ASM) umbrella. Here, the goal is to identify vulnerabilities at any level. These services include managed automated vulnerability scanning (built on top of Rapid7's solutions), attack simulation services (such as phishing and DDoS simulations), and penetration testing and red teaming assessments.

Outside the security realm, Davinsi Labs is now also delivering managed services related to operational (IT) and business monitoring. These services provide visibility into what is going on in a typically very complex enterprise IT environment. With these services, Davinsi Labs leverages its core competency of handling large amounts of data and extracting insights. The services also fit the resilience theme: they can provide early warnings or help troubleshoot issues, which in turn avoids or minimises the impact of an incident.

Go to market

Davinsi Labs is a subsidiary of Proximus (NXT). Because they are able to leverage the Proximus sales force, Davinsi Labs itself can get away with having relatively few salespeople. Instead, Proximus often includes Davinsi Labs in larger contracts due to their expertise in specific areas.

As a result, Davinsi Labs is able to invest considerable energy in deepening their technical knowledge and quality of service, without worrying to become too much of a niche player.

Differentiators

Managed service first

When Proximus bought Davinsi Labs in 2017, it gave the company the mandate to develop a managed services offering. From that moment, Davinsi Labs has built its business primarily on managed services, starting with MDR.

Note that there is a flywheel effect in these services: the more data you see, the more patterns you can uncover, the more experience you gain, etc. The focus on managed services now results in a mature and high quality solution, with a very high fidelity (meaning: alerts are true positives, not false positives).

BeNeLux player backed by Proximus

Davinsi Labs is a local BeNeLux player. While the offerings are built using (global) best-of-breed solutions, the integrations, customisations and overall service layer are built in the BeNeLux. The backing of Proximus allows Davinsi Labs to tackle more ambitious projects than would be possible as a self-funded company.

Future plans

Now that the merger with Umbrio has settled, Davinsi Labs is working on steadily improving its services and onboarding more customers.

Davinsi Labs is also looking at additional international (EU) expansion opportunities.

Company history

Davinsi Labs was founded in 2014, by Bob Ruts, Koen Bossaert and Peter Van Hoorenbeeck.

In 2015, Bram Fabeck joined the management team as COO and later became CEO in 2017.

In 2017, Davinsi Labs was bought by Proximus. Davinsi Labs was given the mandate to build the next gen managed services for the proximus group.

In 2023, Davinsi Labs merged with Umbrio.