ShieldForce Corporation launched in May 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts, securing its first customers within weeks. The company was founded to close a gap Obi Ibeto identified while researching his master's thesis in Computer Science: the financial losses and reputational damage caused by cyberattacks were rising exponentially, while security providers — particularly the ones serving smaller, resource-constrained organizations — were struggling to keep pace.
I am Obi Ibeto, Founder and CEO of ShieldForce. Before founding this company, I built and led EPINEC — a technology consulting company that traces back to a pharmaceutical distribution business my father founded in Lagos, Nigeria in 1994, which I transformed into a technology company in 2013. That work, and the broader arc of my career in the Microsoft Cloud Solutions ecosystem, gave me over 16 years of hands-on experience designing, securing, and optimizing cloud environments for organizations that needed enterprise-grade protection without an enterprise budget or an in-house IT department. Hear more about that journey on the Massachusetts Business Network podcast →
ShieldForce didn't start as a healthcare-exclusive company. In its earliest days, the client base spanned healthcare providers, construction companies, clean energy firms, auto dealers, and manufacturers — a broad cross-section of the small and mid-sized businesses that face the same threats as large enterprises without the same resources to defend against them. Within its first year, the company had already expanded internationally, with teams supporting clients in the UK, Nigeria, and Australia alongside its Boston headquarters. Read more about ShieldForce's early growth from the Massachusetts Founders Network →
That early, broad experience is exactly what led to a deliberate narrowing. The security gap between large healthcare institutions and the organizations that actually reach patients in their homes — home health agencies, hospice providers, community health centers — was wider and more consequential than the gap in almost any other sector ShieldForce served. The managed security products available to home health agencies were adapted from products built for financial services companies and technology firms. The pricing was designed for budgets home health agencies don't have. The compliance knowledge was designed for regulatory environments home health agencies don't operate in. The clinical context — the understanding of what an EHR downtime means for a nurse caring for a patient with terminal cancer, or what a breach means for a family whose loved one shared their final confessions with a hospice chaplain — was absent from the products on the market.
ShieldForce exists today to fill that gap, and the company has built its current program specifically around it.
What Makes ShieldForce Different: Healthcare Focus
ShieldForce's current client base and product roadmap are built specifically around home health agencies, hospice providers, and community health centers. This focus shapes everything about how the company operates today. Our HIPAA compliance documentation is built by people who have supported home health agencies through OCR investigations, not adapted from generic compliance templates. Our pricing is set at a level that organizations operating on Medicare reimbursement and Section 330 grants can actually afford.
When a ShieldForce SOC analyst receives a security alert at 2am from a home health agency's clinical supervisor's laptop, they apply knowledge of what that clinical supervisor does, what the EHR architecture looks like, what the HIPAA breach notification implications are, and what the appropriate response is given the clinical context — because the program was built around exactly this kind of environment.
The Foundation Behind ShieldForce
ShieldForce's approach draws on Obi's 16-plus years building and leading technology and cloud security work through EPINEC, combined with graduate research in Computer Science that directly shaped ShieldForce's operating model — including research applying NIST CSF 2.0 principles to how organizational security controls align with regulatory obligations across healthcare and other regulated industries.
EPINEC LLC also run by Obi Ibeto is an Information Technology Company that specializes in delivering IT goods and services for local, state and federal government agencies presently certified in the state of Massachusetts and the City of Boston. The company holds an active federal contracting, including a U.S. Navy Blanket Purchase Agreement (CAGE code 9RQ80) — direct experience with the kind of federal compliance rigor that carries over into how ShieldForce approaches HIPAA and healthcare regulatory work.
The ShieldForce Commitment
Every home health patient deserves care delivered by an organization that takes their privacy seriously. Every hospice patient deserves to know that the confidences they share with their care team are protected. Every FQHC patient deserves a health center that meets its federal compliance obligations with the same commitment it brings to clinical care. ShieldForce exists to make that possible — for every agency, regardless of size, budget, or technical staffing. The $35/user/month price is not an afterthought. It is a direct expression of the mission: enterprise-grade protection at a price every healthcare organization can access.
We look forward to protecting your patients alongside you.
Closing
The organizations that win — that pass audits, retain referral relationships, and recover quickly when incidents occur — are the ones that treated security as an investment, not an afterthought. ShieldForce exists to make that investment accessible to your home health agency regardless of size, budget, or technical staffing. Start with a free assessment.
→ About ShiedForce - https://shieldforce.io/about
→ Massachusetts Business Network Podcast - https://massachusettsbusinessnetwork.com/podcast/episode-196-obi-ibeto/
→ Massachusetts Founders Network - https://massfoundersnetwork.org/journal/shieldforce-defending-data-empowering-communities/
→ Contact ShieldForce Corporation - https://shieldforce.io/contact