Meade Engineering

Alerts were already coming in before the new hire even made it to his desk.

He had just joined Meade Engineering and was trying to sign into his work account from his computer while also connecting to Microsoft Teams on his phone. Because he was using an outside VPN, the account was locked. Huntress flagged the seemingly anomalous behavior immediately.

By the time he walked over to IT, Tarah Martin already knew what had happened.

"I was able to tell him the precise VPN he used," says Martin, IT Support Admin at Meade Engineering.

For a company that's grown from roughly 40 people to more than 150 in only a year, that kind of visibility is essential. Meade Engineering hopes to reach 1,000 employees within the next five years. But for now, even with those ambitious goals, the IT team is only two people. The small team handles just about everything, like support tickets, employee onboarding, software reviews, cybersecurity, and the ongoing work of keeping an engineering firm moving.

It was obvious Martin needed security that could scale faster than the team could hire.

Challenge | A small IT team trying to protect a fast-growing company

Before Huntress, Meade Engineering relied mostly on Windows Defender for Endpoint and multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Not surprisingly, that setup had limits. As the company grew, Martin was charged with protecting more people, more devices, and more ways of working without adding a pile of manual security work on top of everything else. Meanwhile, employees were growing frustrated with MFA prompts that followed them everywhere.

"You literally would drive five minutes away and have to enter MFA," Martin says.

When Meade's previous IT director left, Martin saw an opening to rethink the company's security posture. She suggested easing up on MFA friction, but only if Meade added stronger protection behind the scenes.

"I was like, hey, here's my security proposal," she says. "And it was Huntress."

The decision came down to practicality. Meade was growing quickly, but it wasn't ready for an enterprise-grade platform that required heavy management. Martin wanted security that could protect the business while also helping her team understand exactly what to do when something went wrong.

"At the end of the day, what's going to help me grow as a person in my knowledge? That was Huntress," she says.

Solution | Security that works in the background and explains itself

Meade trialed Huntress in November 2025 and decided to roll it out soon after.

Today, Martin relies on Huntress Managed Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), and Managed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) for Meade's environment.

The rollout gave Martin fast, reliable visibility without forcing her to live inside a security console. With Huntress' human-led, AI-centric Security Operations Center (SOC) monitoring activity 24/7, Martin's team gets round-the-clock support, separating routine noise from the issues that actually need attention. When something does require action, Huntress provides remediation guidance that's clear enough for a lean IT team to follow without guesswork.

"What I love about Huntress is the step-by-step guidance," Martin says. "It educates me on why something's important."

Martin works long hours and can't afford to watch logs all day. When Huntress flags activity, they give her the context she needs to understand what happened and how to respond. Low-impact incidents are automatically reviewed and resolved by the Huntress SOC, which helps keep minor issues from becoming another manual, time-consuming task on Martin's plate.

"I don't have to sit here and watch everything," Martin says. "Huntress flags real issues, and they're always monitoring our systems to allow us to focus on other things."

The remediation guidance also makes coverage easier when Martin is away. If a newer teammate gets an incident while she's on vacation, she can simply tell them to log in, follow the steps, and reach out to the employee involved.

"The steps are just very detailed," she adds.

Results | Clearer visibility as the business adds people and devices

Huntress quickly became part of Meade Engineering's everyday security rhythm.

Martin now relies on Huntress reports to show leadership what's being investigated, what incidents were found, and whether the platform is doing its job. That visibility even helped win over Meade's CEO.

"He's a numbers guy," Martin says. "When he saw how much Huntress analyzed and what it was doing, he was like, 'This is insane. Yeah, we definitely needed this.'"

The platform also helped Martin spot risky employee behavior that could've easily gone unnoticed. In one case, Huntress flagged that someone was storing passwords in an Excel file. Martin reached out to the employee and politely explained why an unprotected spreadsheet wasn't a safe place to store passwords. From there, they moved the information into the company's approved password manager.

Martin estimates Huntress saves her team about a full day during investigation and remediation. When something looks suspicious, Huntress helps her quickly contain the affected computer, understand what happened, and follow clear next steps, rather than requiring her to piece it all together from scratch.

Meade Engineering is still growing, and Martin is already thinking about what comes next. She wants broader coverage for remote users and bring-your-own-device scenarios as the company continues to scale.

She's also excited about Huntress Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM). ISPM helps teams find risky identity configurations in Microsoft 365, understand why those risks matter, and fix issues. For Martin, the value is a clearer picture of identity risk and another safeguard against changes that could create problems later. "We were able to see by using this that we had more admin accounts than we thought. I thought we deleted those. We were able to remediate that automatically. That's super helpful. It flags it, explains why it's important — and that was a big thing for me."

For now, Huntress gives Meade Engineering something simple but important: confidence that someone is watching while the IT team focuses on the work that keeps the business growing.

"Huntress is always working in the background," Martin says. "They're always there, protecting our company."