CRN Channel Awards Australia: Finalist Q&A with Sam Lewis, Founder and Director at Endpoint Focus

Sam Lewis talks about being a finalist at this year's CRN Channel Awards Australia

Sam Lewis has been in the Australian IT industry since 2005, with previous roles at Invizage, Dimension Data, and Thomas Duryea Consulting. In 2016, he co-founded Endpoint Focus, a Melbourne-based endpoint security specialist working with mid-market and enterprise organisations across healthcare, government, and financial services. As co-founder and director, Sam leads a 13-person team known for tackling complex problems others tend to avoid. Their work at Western Health, Australia's first large-scale Island Enterprise Browser deployment, is what brings him to the CRN awards this year. Away from the office, he is an SFFPC tinkerer, watch enthusiast, and lifelong metalhead.

What prompted you to enter the CRN Channel Awards Australia this year?

Honestly, the Western Health project made it an easy call, but I want to be straight about our actual role. We facilitated the introduction to Island and helped manage the proof of value. The technical delivery was led by Western Health's own engineers, particularly Nitin, who was instrumental in the early success of the project. Island's engineering team in the UK were also heavily involved throughout that stage.

We came in later, when Nitin and the wider team's capacity got stretched by the New Footscray Hospital build. Jeroen stepped in as technical architect and program manager, working across multiple parts of the business to optimise the end user experience, drive adoption, and develop and test new use cases. That work, and the value it's driven for Western Health, is something that we’re hugely proud of.

What would winning this award mean to both your teams and your customers/partners?

For the team? A lot. We're 13 people doing work that's usually done by organisations three or four times our size. Everyone here is technically exceptional and genuinely cares about the outcome, not just getting the job done and moving on. Winning would be a real nod to that. For our customers, it's reassurance that the partner they've picked is as good as they thought. Western Health put a lot of faith in us to assist in a project that had never been done in Australia before, in an environment where getting it wrong isn't just a business problem, it impacts people who are sick and vulnerable and healthcare workers who are under enough pressure already. And for the team personally, a bit of external recognition goes a long way when you're a small crew taking on complex work every day.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

The Western Health project is the obvious answer, but honestly? Our people.

Keeping a culture of trust and flexibility while still getting the less glamorous stuff done is harder than it sounds. Compliance requirements, everyday admin, the tasks nobody really wants to own. Not exciting, but they matter. The way we work through it is treating trust as a genuine two-way thing. The team knows the flexibility they get comes with real ownership of their responsibilities. Once people understand the "why" behind the less interesting tasks, it stops feeling like a chore.

Practically, that looks like no micromanagement, a pub test when we hire (would we actually enjoy catching up with this person after work?), genuine flexibility around hours and personal circumstances, and a wellness program we're building with the team rather than handing down to them. Great Place to Work named us one of Australia's Best Workplaces in Technology this year, so we must be doing something right.

What have been the biggest challenges of the current year so far and how have you overcome them?

AI. Full stop. It's moving faster than most organisations' defences can keep up with, and that's a real problem for our clients.

We're approaching it from a few angles. We're watching things like Anthropic's Project Glasswing closely, because understanding how AI is being used to find and exploit vulnerabilities matters if you want to stay ahead of it. We're running regular sessions with our team and clients so nobody's caught flat-footed. And CrowdStrike and Island, our two main vendor partners, have both built AI protection tools directly into their platforms, so we're getting those deployed properly for the clients who need them.

Most organisations aren't slow because they lack good tools. They're slow because they don't have the time, the internal resource, or a clear starting point. That's the gap we fill.

What lessons do you think the industry has learned over the past year, and what changes does it still need to make?

The big one is that buying good technology and actually implementing it well are two completely different things. There are organisations sitting on platforms they're barely using, modules switched off, configurations set up in a rush and never touched since. The tools aren't the problem. The gap is always in what happens after you buy them.

Security also has to work for the people using it. If it's too clunky or time-consuming, people find a way around it. That's how you end up with Shadow IT and staff feeding sensitive data into public AI tools they shouldn't be near.

And the industry still hasn't cracked partnership after the sale. Too many providers hand over the project and disappear. In most industries, that's just disappointing. In healthcare, it can genuinely put patient safety at risk.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming 12 months, and how do you plan to capitalise on those?

Healthcare is the obvious one for us, and for good reason. It's Australia's most breached sector, it holds some of the most sensitive data imaginable, and the device environments are genuinely complex. Western Health showed us what's possible when you get the technology and the implementation right together. We want to do more of that.

AI is the other one. Organisations are picking up AI tools faster than their security teams can get their heads around, and that creates a real need for someone who understands both sides of it. We're building that capability out now.

Beyond that, it's really about scale. We've proven the model. The next 12 months are about getting in front of more of the right organisations and doing it again.

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