Shield53 is a Canadian cybersecurity services firm that provides SOC-as-aservice, incident response, virtual CISO, and infrastructure security supportto clients across various industries, including healthcare, finance, education,and manufacturing.

Chris Stewart founded Shield53 after leading a 130-client managed securityservice provider (MSSP) and responding to over 300 ransomware incidents.His key insight: most breaches weren’t inevitable, they were the result ofmissed signals and burned-out analysts.

He built Shield53 to streamline detections and protect organizations againstbreaches. As his client base expanded, the team needed a way to scaleinvestigations without hiring or falling back on brittle SOAR setups.Dropzone lets them do both.

Shield53 was looking for a solution to the following challenges:

It took Shield53 less than 30 minutes to get DropzoneAI running. No playbooks, no scripting, just API keysand a connection to CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender,Entra ID, and internal asset inventory.

“We had instant results. We tossed in some API keys,and Dropzone started working right away. For a small,nimble team, that kind of low-maintenance setup is ahuge win,” says Stewart.

Within minutes, Dropzone AI was triaging alerts withthe same rigor as a Tier 1 analyst, stitching in useridentity, subnet data, and threat intel, and sendingresults directly into JIRA.

Today, there is no need for custom playbooks or SOARworkflows. Dropzone’s output includes full investigationswith conclusions that analysts can act on. High-priority alertinvestigations are escalated via AlertOps, and conversationstake place in Microsoft Teams.

Shield53 also uses Dropzone AI to automate containmenttasks, such as isolating endpoints or disabling compromisedaccounts according to client policies and predefined usecases approved with their clients.

With Dropzone AI running triage, analysts spend just 1–4hours per shift on alerts, reclaiming time for higher-impactsecurity work.