IT is 8:30 on a Wednesday morning and the members of the Purple Team have already recorded more than 25-million cyberattacks around the world.

But that number is not unusual for members of the Purple Team, a crack group of Jamaican cybersecurity experts who provide services for major entities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

According to Jermaine Bryan, technical service manager of the Purple Team, which is a member of Jamaica-based Optimity Group, its members record between 20 and 60 million cyberattacks around the world each day.

“The Purple Team is a cybersecurity and managed security service provider focused on arming information technology (IT) infrastructure globally. Our strategy works because they offer both defensive services but also offensive services,” founder and CEO of the Optimity Group Mario Sparkes told the Jamaica Observer during a recent interview.

The company’s other services include managed detection and response, phishing campaigns, dark web monitoring, governance and compliance, video forensics and other IT solutions.

“The Purple Team’s IT solutions are ready to combat all exploitable vulnerabilities within a network and to provide your organisation with the necessary training and compliance to shield your business from future vulnerabilities. We ensure you are cyber-secure,” added Sparks, who formed the company three years ago.

Sparks told the Observer that he initially started with MS Tech Solutions Limited, a consulting company that specialises in the architecture, implementation and management of key network and IT.

But seeing the need for more cybersecurity in the local and international marketplace, he launched Purple Team with a novel approach to focus on this area.

“I sat with the team and said in order to create a brand that would set us apart from everyone else, not just in the Caribbean, we needed to create our own workforce. It is well known that there is a significant skills shortage relating to cybersecurity across the world and what I wanted to do was to create a company with expert home-grown Jamaican talent.

“And not just from the traditional places, we wanted to go into the grass roots, high schools and pick out brilliant Jamaicans…and create our own internship programme where we uncovered those smart Jamaicans and threw them into a 12-month paid internship and at the end of that we would have outputted highly certified cybersecurity analysts and network engineers who would be able to stand against other North American cyber analysts,” said Sparks.

He added that after 12 months of internship and six months of shadowing senior staff, the young people finished with nine industry standard certificates which made them able to compete against anyone in the world.

“We could have hired the talent from elsewhere but we wanted to ensure that when we say to a customer that an engineer can do this, it is because we have trained them as opposed to hiring someone based on their resume. We identified the talent and we brought them up to speed,” said Sparks.

With the trained members of the Purple Team, Sparks started to offer its services to North America with almost immediate success based on the advantages such as near-shore, time and language which Jamaica possess.

Sparks noted that in 18 months the talented young people, who were taken on as early as 17 and 18 years old have received certification that would have taken others in the IT space years to acquire.

With their skills in great demand internationally Sparks is pulling out all the stops to hang on to them.

“We have to pay them very well,” declared Sparkes.

He told the Observer that Jamaicans in North America and the UK were quick to welcome the Purple Team once its members provided their competence and the service was provided at a more cost effective price.

“The whole system was designed to change the narrative of how Jamaica is seen in North America as it relates to tech and the high skilled work that can come out of Jamaica,” added Sparks.

“We have signed some very significant contracts, particularly in Canada in which we are going to be handling the exclusive network infrastructure and managing that are here in Jamaica. We are under NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) so we can’t call names, but they are major.”