Bigger, Bolder, Better: How HOOP Cyber Joining FSP Is Reshaping Security Operations
In an industry that is never short of announcements, genuinely transformative moments can be easy to miss. The news that HOOP Cyber, one of the UK’s most innovative specialist security data operations firms, has joined the FSP Consulting Services Group, is one that deserves to be heard clearly.
To explore what it means, Lisa Ventura MBE FCIIS sat down with Simon Johnson, CEO and Founder of HOOP Cyber, for a wide-ranging conversation about the partnership, the rationale behind it, and what lies ahead for customers and the broader industry.
The Problem HOOP Cyber Was Built to Solve
When Simon Johnson founded HOOP Cyber three years ago, he had a clear and pressing problem in his sights. Having spent years working across security operations, SIEM, and threat intelligence, he had seen the same challenge play out time and again at organisations of all sizes: security data volumes had grown exponentially, but the tools and architectures used to manage them had not kept pace.
“My SIEM was fantastic and it was great ten years ago when I had 100 gigabytes of data, but now I’ve got two or three terabytes of data a day and I’m struggling.”- Simon Johnson, CEO and Founder, HOOP Cyber.
For many security teams, what had once been a quick and efficient way to interrogate data had become, in Simon’s words, “a genuine data engineering millstone around the neck.” Storing, querying, and drawing insight from vast quantities of security data had become slower, more complex, and significantly more costly.
HOOP Cyber was built specifically to address this reality, developing a set of approaches centred on what the firm calls modernised security operations. At its core is the conviction that cybersecurity is, fundamentally, a data problem. The company’s flagship offering, HOOP Lake, powered by Amazon Security Lake, transforms the way security teams can stream, store, search, enrich, and comply across their entire estate of security events, using standardised schemas such as OCSF and natural language query capabilities to make security data genuinely accessible and actionable.
Why FSP? Why Now?
Simon spoke candidly about the journey that led him here, and the qualities that made FSP the right partner at the right moment.
As HOOP Cyber grew, it found itself working with some very large customers. Delivering outstanding outcomes at that scale required significant capacity and capability that, as a focused specialist firm, was not easy to build alone. Simon began actively exploring how to deliver at the pace and scale his clients needed, while preserving the values and culture that had made HOOP Cyber distinctive.
FSP Consulting Services Group is a 450-person cyber consulting business headquartered in Reading, UK. It has earned a strong industry reputation not only for technical excellence across enterprise transformation and cyber security, but also for being recognised as an outstanding place to work, a quality that Simon found was lived out genuinely by the people he encountered day to day.
“Culture is absolutely key to any successful environment. I think I definitely felt like the culture is a perfect fit.” – Simon Johnson, CEO and Founder, HOOP Cyber.
Beyond the culture question, FSP offered the capacity and multi-domain capability to take HOOP Cyber’s work further than it could travel alone. Where HOOP had historically operated within the specific domain of security operations, FSP opens the door to a broader set of disciplines including data engineering, AI adoption, and enterprise transformation, creating a proposition that can support clients across and beyond the CISO’s remit.
What This Means for Existing Customers
For those already working with HOOP Cyber, the message from Simon is very reassuring. The core focus remains unchanged: building modernised security operations with a data-centric approach. What changes is the scale at which HOOP can deliver, and the breadth of expertise it can bring to bear.
Key Points for Existing HOOP Cyber Clients:
- The same specialist focus on security data operations and SIEM modernisation continues
- Delivery can now happen at significantly greater scale, backed by a 450-person consultancy
- Clients gain access to FSP’s broader capabilities across cyber, data engineering, and AI adoption
- Services extend across the UK and, in time, across EMEA and the US
- FSP’s vendor-agnostic approach means clients receive the right solution for their specific environment
As Simon put it simply, for existing clients it is “nothing changes. Hopefully it’s only just a bit more of the same good stuff.” The expanded platform means that HOOP Cyber can now help clients not only with the technical mechanics of managing security data, but also with how they securely adopt AI, understand the business case and return on investment behind AI investments, and navigate the intersection of data, security, and digital transformation.
The AWS Partnership: A Strategic Differentiator
One of the most significant aspects of HOOP Cyber’s heritage that it carries into the FSP Group is its strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services. This is, in Simon’s view, one of the most compelling elements of the combined offering.
AWS has been a strong advocate for HOOP Cyber’s growth, particularly in the areas of security data modernisation and Amazon Security Lake. FSP, for its part, had been looking to deepen its AWS capabilities to serve the many clients who have substantial investments in AWS environments or who run SaaS applications within AWS infrastructure.
The result is a focused ambition: to build a world-class AWS partnership that can offer FSP clients a completely new level of experience around the adoption of AWS solutions, cloud migrations, and the broader AWS ecosystem. It is a natural extension of the data-centric security work HOOP Cyber has always done, now with the scale and reach of a larger enterprise consultancy behind it.
The Future of Security Data Operations
The conversation with Lisa Ventura MBE FCIIS closed with a forward-looking question: what does the future of security data operations actually look like? Simon offered a grounded and thoughtful perspective, shaped by years of working at the coalface of the problem.
The fundamental challenge will not change. Security remains a data problem. The questions that will increasingly preoccupy security teams are architectural and strategic: should data be centralised or left distributed? How can data lake solutions such as Amazon Security Lake enable aggregation without the cost and complexity of traditional approaches? How can open schemas like OCSF make data simpler and faster to query? Can federated search and query capabilities decouple data storage from data interrogation?
“It’s critical to be able to have access to the right data, to ask that data the right question at the right time.” – Simon Johnson, CEO and Founder, HOOP Cyber.
AI will inevitably play an increasingly prominent role, and Simon acknowledged this candidly, noting that the industry will “continue to see a splattering of AI here, there, and everywhere.” Detection as code, doing more with less, and smarter automation are themes that will persist. But underneath all of it, the data problem endures, and that is precisely where HOOP Cyber and FSP are focused.
A Purposeful, People-Centred Approach
Throughout the conversation not only the strategic logic of the partnership emphasised, but also the spirit in which it had been forged. This is a combination built on shared values, a genuine alignment of culture, and a belief that the best outcomes for clients come from organisations where people are genuinely invested in each other’s success.
As Lisa observed in closing, this is precisely the kind of purposeful, people-centred approach to cybersecurity that the industry needs considerably more of. The joining of HOOP Cyber and FSP Consulting Services Group is not simply a corporate transaction; it is a signal of intent, and one that the security data operations space would do well to pay close attention to.
Find Out More
Whether you are an existing HOOP Cyber client, a prospective partner, or simply following the evolution of security data operations, this is a chapter worth watching closely.
This article is based on a video interview conducted by Lisa Ventura MBE FCIIS. To learn more about HOOP Cyber’s services, visit www.hoopcyber.com.
