A South Carolina company has agreed to acquire Cascade Defense LLC, a Spokane Valley-based information technology security service company. 

The acquirer, Green Cloud Technologies LLC, has stated it intends to double the size of the service provider’s current workforce here within two years.

Steve Sims, who co-founded Cascade Defense with Eric Foster in 2017, says the company primarily provides IT security for organizations that don’t have the skillset or budget to retain an IT security employee.

Located in about 3,600 square feet of office space at 12710 E. Mirabeau Parkway, in Spokane Valley, Cascade Defense offers services such as managed firewalls and email security, as well as network architecture and design, configuration and implementation of smart appliances, and review of existing network security configurations.

The company employs 10 people currently.

The transaction is expected to be completed in early March, at which time Cascade will rebrand as Green Cloud. Sims and Keith Coker, co-founder and CEO of Green Cloud, decline to disclose terms of the transaction.

Coker says Cascade was an attractive acquisition target because Green Cloud lacked the resources to create its own security services division.

“Internally at Green Cloud, we didn’t have the expertise or the product structure to build that out,” Coker says.

Green Cloud provides managed IT services, particularly cloud services, Coker says. Founded in 2011, Green Cloud reports about $26 million in annual revenue, he says.

“We give (clients) the ability to offer cloud infrastructure services to those small and medium business on our infrastructure and then represent it as their own,” Coker says. “For us, it’s about filling out a product suite. Security is a growing industry. It’s a rapidly evolving industry, and the expertise just doesn’t exist downmarket.”

Talks to acquire Cascade, which Sims says has about $2 million in annual revenue, started in mid-2020. One of Green Cloud’s executives had previously worked with Cascade’s Sims and Foster and had been pleased with their performance. 

Coker says Green Cloud currently has 70 total employees. Spokane will be Green Cloud’s sixth and largest regional office, he says, and Green Cloud plans to expand the number of employees at the Spokane office. 

During the course of the next two years, the number of employees at the Spokane location is likely to at least double, Coker says. He contends the talent pool for cybersecurity in the Spokane area is sufficient to provide the expertise and manpower the Spokane location will need.

“One of the other things we looked at when we looked at Cascade is that they have relationships inside the community to continue to grow the employee base there in Spokane Valley,” he says.

The need for continuous monitoring in the field of managed security services means the Spokane office will become a security operations center, he says.

“We’ve got to be able to focus on 24/7 operations and grow the team accordingly,” Sims says.

Coker says the acquisition will allow Green Cloud to offer the kind of expertise larger companies receive to its small and medium business clients.

“Cascade was a natural fit, adding the expertise and a deep understanding of security, as well as a product portfolio that we could enhance and then take to our managed service providers,” Coker says. “Cascade is more of a technically-focused company. They have a lot of deep industry expertise that had not invested significantly in the sales and marketing area.”