Jim LaRoe
CEO
Cybersecurity, Entrepreneur
Dallas, TX, USA
Listen to Jim’s Podcast!
Jim LaRoe is Symphion’s dynamic leader with a special combination of skills, experience and insight. This combination has driven Symphion’s success since its inception to become the world’s leader in print fleet cybersecurity. Jim LaRoe is a Rice University engineer, an accomplished trial lawyer, and a repeat successful entrepreneur. Symphion, Inc., founded in 1999 and based in Dallas, Texas, is a software and services company specializing in print fleet cybersecurity. Its flagship offering—Print Fleet Cyber Security as a Service™—is a fully managed, vendor-agnostic solution. It is designed to secure one of the most overlooked and vulnerable segments of the network: printers.
Symphion
On large networks, printer endpoints represent 20%–30% of all network endpoints. Yet an estimated 99% of them remain unprotected, unhardened, unpatched, unmonitored, and unmaintained. Symphion exists to solve this critical security gap.
Symphion’s turnkey service combines enterprise-grade software with a concierge delivery model. This removes operational burdens while ensuring full lifecycle security for multi-vendor print fleets. Symphion’s Service provides perpetual cyber hygiene across all makes, models, types, ages and firmware versions of imaging devices. These devices comprise each business’s print fleet. It includes perpetual asset lifecycle management and security configuration management, including password management. Additionally, it covers firmware management, security certificate management, monitoring, remediation, and executive and operational-level reporting. All this is under a predictable and affordable per-device pricing model.
Managing Constant Change
Symphion’s Service is set apart because it seamlessly addresses the heightened security risk created by the rampant changes affecting print fleets. These changes include changes in the printers, service providers and technicians, the network upon which they reside as endpoints, and business activities such as mergers or acquisitions. It also covers changes in regulations and requirements, and of course, changes by bad actors. One prevalent change is the “human behavior” risk of printer technicians resetting them to factory defaults after servicing, which eliminates even the best-intentioned security configurations. Without Symphion automated monitoring, remediation and concierge support, changes go undetected and unaddressed. This unnecessarily exposes the business to extreme risk and outages.
Symphion has established itself as a trusted partner to enterprise and healthcare clients nationwide. Additionally, it establishes, strengthens, and maintains basic and advanced standards-based cyber hygiene across thousands of vulnerable printer endpoints. Symphion helps them achieve compliance (e.g., HIPAA) while at the same time reducing costs. Its’ scalable approach brings previously unattainable levels of control and visibility to this frequently ignored endpoint category.
Jim LaRoe is also featured on our premiere Features Page, and you can read the Podcast Interview Transcript.
