Joe Morin

The Guy Who Spent 20 Years Learning Every Security Platform - Then Decided to Beat Them All

Before Joe Morin was a CEO, he was the guy who knew where all the bodies were buried. Not literally - this is cybersecurity, not a mob drama - but he spent two decades in the trenches at SurfControl, Websense, Comodo, Barracuda Networks, Forcepoint, and Zscaler. Sales engineering. Alliance management. The unglamorous work of understanding exactly how security tools actually fit together in the real world, versus how they're pitched on a deck.

That vantage point built something most security executives don't have: a deeply vendor-agnostic worldview. Every company he worked for had something to sell. Morin absorbed the strengths - and catalogued the gaps. By the time he founded CyFlare in 2017, he wasn't interested in building the next great security product. He wanted to build the operating system underneath all of them.

CyFlare operates as a managed security operations company - or more precisely, as what Morin describes as a Cyber OS. The CyFlare ONE platform supports over 200 API integrations, pulling together the best-of-breed tools an organization already has and wrapping them in a 24/7 security operations center. The insight is simple and slightly contrarian: customers shouldn't have to abandon their existing investments to get better security outcomes. They need someone to make it all work.

The model has resonated in a market where enterprises are drowning in security products that don't talk to each other. Six consecutive years in the Top 20 Global MSSP rankings is not an accident. Neither is the 854% growth rate over three years that landed CyFlare on the Inc. 5000 in both 2022 and 2023. The company ranked #5 on CRN's 2025 Fast Growth 150 list - rarefied air for a 58-person firm operating out of Western New York rather than Silicon Valley.

Morin has built CyFlare around a channel-first philosophy. Partners who deliver CyFlare to their customers earn 40%+ margins, which explains why MSPs and MSSPs keep showing up. He speaks at The MSP Summit, MSSP Alert Live, and Channel Futures with the fluency of someone who has been on both sides of the table - vendor and operator - and knows what the channel actually needs to hear.

His personal motto, reportedly, is three words: "We do not lose." It is the kind of thing that either sounds like a cliche or explains everything about how a firm gets to Top 20 MSSP status in seven years from a standing start. Given the numbers, it seems to be the latter.

His approach to cybersecurity architecture is worth understanding. In an industry that constantly pitches "platform consolidation" - the idea that you should run everything through one vendor - Morin argues for something more nuanced: convergence without unification. The goal is to make different tools work together seamlessly, not to force customers into a single vendor's walled garden. This is a meaningful philosophical stance, particularly for organizations that have already built diverse security stacks and aren't keen to rip and replace.

The recent partnership with Crown Castle - announced in March 2026 - illustrates how this translates in practice. CyFlare brings its managed SOC capabilities to Crown Castle's customers, extending enterprise-grade security operations to organizations that couldn't otherwise afford or staff them. Morin describes it as "a partnership built on trust, accountability, and a shared commitment to delivering meaningful outcomes." Not marketing boilerplate: a description of what managed security actually requires to work at scale.

Then there's the LinkedIn handle. Cyberbatman. It has been his professional identity for years - a signal, intentional or not, that this is someone who takes the mission seriously but doesn't take himself too seriously. It also happens to be extremely easy to find, which may not be entirely coincidental for someone who has spent his career building relationships in the channel.