Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul, Co-CEOs of UpGuard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the next piece of questioning. What do you see as emerging trends and open problems that you would recommend a new entrepreneur with expertise in your domain should be looking into?

Mike Baukes: One of the things that is becoming increasingly apparent is a lack of understanding of not only some of the abilities of third parties to create upstream impact into your business, but also more importantly, of the ability to transfer risk to third parties and the ability to acquire a type of insurance of some form. When you think of all those kinds of trends, these are things that aren’t going to stop.

We stick broadly around death, taxes, and breaches. What we are beginning to understand is with the Internet effectively democratizing education and the ability to be able to get access to information, there’s a global level of knowledge that is increasing dramatically, particularly around communications and IT.

If you look at that, there’re a lot of amazing technologically savvy individuals coming out. If you think about it, there’s a generation of people who are using the building blocks of something like Minecraft to effectively construct servers and build out collaborative environment. What we are seeing now is that those people are going to be increasingly more alligned in a more sophisticated business context. Their needs are far different to what historically were paper-based solutions and analog processes.

The ability to circumvent will only increase the concept of shadow IT. They’re going to bring their own solutions and services into these organizations because they just want to do things faster. That speed and requirement is going to change a great deal of the way that businesses interact not only internally, but more importantly, the way that they interact with B2B or B2C customers. What that means isn’t that everyone is going to start using Snapchat but it’s really going to come down to a tradeoff towards, “Our company is more willing to have somewhat exposed privacy concerns versus security.” Privacy versus security is something that I think no one has a great answer for. No one has a great answer at the moment.

A lot of people are either in one camp or the other and some are drifting between them. The reality is that security and securing processes, and making things safer is clearly something that needs to happen. Clearly, more people are going to be aware of them. More entrepreneurs should focus on that. On top of that, the unit economics of running a business on the Internet is something that is incredibly interesting at the moment. The ability to transform a business and take a series of processes internally and distribute them among SaaS applications is incredibly interesting. Is the infrastructure that the vendor uses of good quality?

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul, Co-CEOs of UpGuard
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