Innovation wins. Why smaller beats bigger

Benedict Jones spent years working for McAfee and Sophos. While doing threat research at Sophos, he spotted a problem in mobile threat defence that nobody had actually fixed.

He’s now CEO and founder of Trustd Mobile, and the story of how he got there says more about MSP buying decisions than most vendor pitches ever will.

While at Sophos, Benedict saw mobile move from a footnote to a weapon of choice. Phishing and malware apps were multiplying, but it was something else that got him to dig deeper. 

Organisations that already had a mobile threat defence product were still getting breached. That shifted the focus from “why don’t organisations protect their phones” to “why are the ones that do still falling victim?”

Built to protect. Left on the shelf

Benedict realised detection was only part of the problem. The bigger one was usability. As he told me

Existing mobile threat defense solutions presented challenges. They were imperfect. They were underserving the market. And that meant that organizations were struggling to deploy them because they were very cumbersome to deploy. They were complicated to get started.

They weren’t great at catching threats. They relied on quite old school and archaic approaches to security.

Those mobile safety products drained batteries, slowed connections, and got in the way of people trying to do their jobs.

On BYOD devices they were so privacy invasive that employees refused to install them. Faced with that friction, organisations did one of two things. They accepted the risk and switched the protection off, or they never got it onto personal devices in the first place.

Either way, the attack surface was exposed. Although the product to protect it existed, nobody used it.

Get usability right and you win the market

Benedict’s read on why mobile threat defence products didn’t get more user-friendly comes down to focus. 

For most security giants, mobile is one line item in a much bigger portfolio, sitting next to endpoint, network, and everything else. When a product area doesn’t carry the business, it doesn’t get the attention a genuine point product gets. And usability is the first thing to slip.

That inspired Benedict to switch direction and work on developing a better mobile safety tool. 

I’ve got a team together, built the prototype, that enabled me to go out and get a bit of investment.

Trustd Mobile’s answer to the usability problem is built around zero trust conditional access for compliance automation and automatic threat remediation, plus zero touch deployment. 

When Suzuki onboarded the platform, every device across the business was protected within one day.

Benedict’s app doesn’t drain the battery or slow the device down, and it doesn’t share privacy sensitive information from personal devices back to the organisation, which matters for anyone still trying to get security onto BYOD. 

He says the company now protects over 1,500 UK organisations and holds a 4.7 star rating from around 13,000 users. He’s proudest of that rating, because it’s a direct measure of usability. .

The figure that started this for him still holds up. Benedict says that in 2026, 73% of organisations have experienced a breach originating from a mobile device in the past year, and that most UK organisations now rank mobile security as a higher priority than before.

But when they go looking for a fix, he says the number one concern isn’t whether it catches threats. It’s whether staff will actually tolerate using it.

Innovation-focused and hard to predict

This story of continuous innovation is a habit for Benedict. He’s consciously pushing himself out of his comfort zone whenever he starts to feel complacent.

Building Trustd Mobile has cost him plenty of comfort. He had two days of holiday in his first year running the business and seven in his second.

With a small team, you know, entering into an established market with big players in there has required a lot of determination, a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of time to pick up new skills and sort of learn build the plane as we fly to a certain extent.

Getting an established market to consider a challenger, rather than default to the household name, has been the hardest part of the job. The old habit of “no one ever got fired for buying a Cisco firewall” is exactly the instinct he’s had to work against.

That same instinct is worth questioning, though, because size cuts both ways.

Cyber criminals design their attacks to circumvent whatever is en masse.

This means the dominant, mass market product is often the one that the attackers have already worked out how to get past. A smaller team can change direction fast, rebuild around what customers are actually telling them, and ship a fix while a larger competitor is still routing it through committee.

It’s less comfortable than sitting inside an established roadmap, but it’s why a small team can outpace a giant on the specific problem it’s built to solve.

We are laser focused on solving the threats of mobile and solving the challenges of mobile from a security and a compliance standpoint.

The question to ask before you buy the big logo

As an MSP building or reviewing a client’s mobile stack, you might have noticed this before. A product that scores well on paper but gets uninstalled or switched off inside a month isn’t protecting anyone.

Before you default to the biggest logo on the shortlist, it’s worth asking who is actually solving the specific problem in front of you, and whether they built it around the people who have to use it every day.

Sometimes that’s the giant. Sometimes, as Benedict found out, it’s the smaller team still building the plane as it flies.

Adam Pilton

Adam is the Cybersecurity Advisor at Heimdal. With over 15 years in law enforcement, where he served as a Detective Sergeant leading Covert Operations and Cyber Crime teams, Adam transitioned to cybersecurity in 2016. Known for simplifying complex topics, Adam leverages his investigative and communication experience to engage leaders and end users alike, driving stronger cyber resilience.