Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone (Part 5)

Leo Taddeo: We’re going to see more focus on data privacy and protection and controlling access to content in an enterprise. That dovetails with this trend towards using Big Data for business analytics. Here’s what I mean. There’s tension between allowing employees access to data they need and maintaining privacy and confidentiality of data. Those two things need to be balanced.

They’re difficult to balance because classification and access management becomes difficult in a large enterprise. The trend towards allowing our employees to access the data they need for analytical purposes is in tension with our need to maintain privacy and confidentiality of records. I think cyber security vendors who can manage the very fine granularity and tight control of what a person can access will provide real value to a trend that is emerging and developing. That is a trend towards really focused use of large datasets to analyse business problems.

For example, having the right people access financial data when they need so they can solve problems and make predictions is important. That access has to be very fine-grained. It has to be limited to what they need. There aren’t very many tools that do that. We’re in that space and being able to do that is a competitive advantage. We have a product called Security Sheriff and that’s what it exactly does.

Sramana Mitra: If you were starting a company today, what would you start?

Leo Taddeo: Let me start with what I wouldn’t start. I think it’s very hard for incident response companies today to get up and running. It’s hard to find the talent. It’s hard to find the customers. The idea of putting a few experts together and being the next Mandiant is a tough one. I don’t see that as a business that has a lot of opportunities for startups. It’s possible, but there are a lot of big brands out there and larger enterprises want to deal with incident response service companies that will scale to their needs.

The smaller companies wind up with a difficult time getting the talent they need and getting the customers that can provide consistent revenue. If I were starting a company today, it would be an additional value add to enterprises that are migrating to the cloud. I think there is tremendous opportunity in augmenting security for AQS and Azure. There are a number of gaps in that security stack that can be built. I think we’re there.

I think there’s a lot of attention being paid to analytics. I do not know if I’d enter that space right now, because it’s so crowded. Five years from now, what we’ll be seeing is more encryption on our own communications devices. There are opportunities there in providing easily manageable encryption. Here is a need that nobody seems to be able to fill. How can we provide a level of confidence to the consumer that their data is secure and, at the same time, meet national security and law enforcement requirements. Then, you have the idea of mobile computing and access to data that enterprises collect and store for employees to use, and maintaining security and proper access levels. We also compete in that space.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Leo Taddeo, Chief Security Officer, Cryptzone
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