Q. What’s been the biggest message you’ve taken away from Infosec this year?
A. A lot of it looks alike; everyone’s talking and saying the same thing. You see a lot of that with cloud computing but a lot of them don’t know what cloud computing is.
Q. So do you think a lot of the approaches to cloud security are lacking something at the moment?
A. I do, particularly in imagination and effective, creative solutions. I don’t see anyone doing anything to target unique specific markets.
Q. What are you doing to stand above the rest of the security vendors then?
A. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months talking about our product strategy and customer service. For me, it’s about looking at security with a fresh set of eyes and looking at threats from a different perspective. I believe there is a tremendous opportunity with convergence – an area that isn’t well addressed at the moment. Our products are doing well and revenues are growing but they’re still kind of like everyone else.
I think it should be a technology-driven market, not just packaging and distribution and so on. I think that will secure both sides because of the threat factor. The fastest growing industry at the moment is cyber crime. It’s constantly changing and is no longer just a bunch of hackers – it’s organised, thoughtful and thorough.
This is where the opportunity lies. While the threat is greater than ever and the losses are great, I think the market is tired of hearing about security. They look at it as a necessary evil – it’s slow, heavy and doesn’t protect them. I don’t think anyone – consumers of businesses – feel secure. That’s compounded if you’re a small business because you’ve got additional constraints such as government regulations.
Q. So how has that affected your products?
A. Traditionally security has been about keeping the bad guys out, but they are already in, so you need to think about securing firms from the inside. I think we need to look at security from a consumer and SMB point of view. Blurring of private and professional life means that people are revealing information that they wouldn’t want to give away. We’re all moving to a digital world and it’s more difficult to segregate work and private life. I don’t know anyone who has truly segregated devices either. You may have family history, medical records and other sensitive information on there so the potential loss is so much greater.
We think that it all creates a tremendous opportunity – bringing our desktop solution and our SaaS enterprise solutions closer together will help. I don’t think you can solve the personal computer problem by a purely desktop solution.
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Version 7.0 of our product protects the user rather than the device through a very strong password protection system in the cloud, so it can protect you wherever you are and whatever device you’re using, whether it’s a smartphone, laptop or PC. That’s the world we live in now. You have lots of information in the cloud and you want to access it from a variety of devices.
It’s also a hybrid desktop/cloud solution. It moves a lot of the heavy lifting such as analysis new threats to the cloud. It’s probably about 70% on the desktop and 30% in the cloud but we hope to evolve it over time to be more cloud-based.
