Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How can you understand all that? That requires a tremendous amount of intelligence in your system.

Dave Maquera: There are two ways. What the system allows is upload of corpus. If you have a specific set of language or a corpus that you know is acceptable, it can be loaded into the system. If you want to develop one – alongside of us you can do that – we provide a baseline. From a school standpoint, for example, one of the things that is top of mind is cyberbullying. In other words, children essentially harassing each other via social media. What we have is a baseline corpus included in our solution that highlights cyberbullying terminology and can adapt any one of many responses – from alerting school authorities via e-mail, to blocking, to monitoring, etc.

SM: That is actually a good example to clarify what heuristics you are talking about. What about open problems? When you look around, what are some interesting problems that need to be solved and that are not being solved right now?

DM: It all goes back to the theme of how to enable social media and help people manage their security in a proactive way, aligned with whatever organization or group they happen to be a part of. How do you enable and make each individual an asset rather than a liability to managing security? We don’t see that being understood by the industry. On the flip side of it, when you look at the way companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others understand social interactions and information exchanges between people; it is very different from how corporations view information and manage security.

The key difference is what I call the ability to self-manage or group manage security based on the dynamic, the situation, who is part of that group, etc. The biggest challenge for the security industry as a whole is to understand how that works and to emulate or complement how social networks seem to be able to adapt to that readily. In other words, enable users to determine what the best security levels are for themselves and their organizations and dynamically have that implemented. I think that is where we would like to continue to go.

The key difference is that we are hyper focused on the end user. We are not a technology provider that sits out there saying, “We are going to build the best mouse trap and everyone will flock.” We look at it differently. We look at what the user situation is and how we can get the best and most adaptive way to protect people. That is the philosophical difference, and I think along with that the biggest challenge for the security industry.

SM: That is very interesting. Thank you, Dave. It was good talking to you.

DM: Likewise.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave
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