Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Kris Lahiri, Chief Security Officer, Egnyte (Part 6)

Kris Lahiri: We’ve had a company that specializes in just drone pictures. They take live pictures of a site by drones and keeps that integrated. It uses this as an update to see how that project is progressing and roll that up into whatever reporting they want.

It doesn’t have to separately figure out what to do with the data from the company that works on drone. That is integrated through Egnyte. Similarly, there are these ecosystems that are built out for many industries. Life sciences is a good example.

We also see some of these things in the financial industry where where broker-dealers are expected to keep track of documents in a certain format. We provide that capability. There are some of these specialized workflows that different industries leverage.

They leverage our ecosystem very heavily in terms of what other solutions we are already integrated with. There are new companies that come and leverage that same sort of API framework and build their own integrations.

Sramana Mitra: How many such integrations do you have?

Kris Lahiri: A few hundred. I would be surprised if it’s almost up to a thousand or so.

Sramana Mitra: Cool. What do you see as open problems? If you were starting a new company today, what would be a problem that you would be interested in solving to build a new company?

Kris Lahiri: There are many interesting problems, but I will stick to my domain expertise. I still think overall knowledge and security of content. By content, I’m going beyond the concept of just files and all that. Each company’s crown jewels is very different in terms of that content.

People that are doing more training and more advance awareness – anything that makes this easy across the board. That ubiquitous security knowledge and levelling up everybody’s awareness is something that is lacking. Any company that makes this easy would be great. You need someone who’s well aware of all these things.

For example, password managers. People spend so much time and energy in locking the security of the perimeter. With cloud computing and everything moving to SaaS, that whole perimeter has expanded. Now it’s moving more towards people’s security hygiene. This comes only from more awareness.

How would some person who is just new know that this is how you should be setting things up. Okta and some of the other consortiums are heading towards that direction. How do you bring security hygiene to the entire population?

The second thing, which is more short-term, is what started out with GDPR. That concept is being adopted worldwide. One version of it is the CCPA. You can already see that this is not sustainable. You need some type of global data protection. We’ll see how that evolves.

If there was a global data protection scenario and everybody understood their own responsibilities, the damage done by security breaches would have a very different outcome.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Kris Lahiri, Chief Security Officer, Egnyte
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