Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on what you said. I get the sense that you have a company where you were experimenting with some technology. You were experimenting with how to protect data. Explain more about the technology.

John Benkert: It was about being on the hard drive. You can be on top of the OS. The OS has a myriad of problems. People are trying to protect data – antivirus and all that stuff. We decided to embed our technology in the firmware of the hard drive where we can see the data going across that interface and can control what is happening without affecting the speed of the hard drive.

That’s the number one thing. We had to be conscious of that. We just embed our technology inside of the firmware. We have access to the data and we can see when it’s been asked to receive data and when it’s going across the bus. When encryption happens, we can see that. We can block that from happening.

Sramana Mitra: From a go-to-market strategy, how does that play? Do you have to work with the SSD manufacturers? Do they have to factor you in their go-to-market strategy?

John Benkert: These were the things that I didn’t think of back then. We didn’t want to be a hard drive manufacturer. There are people who do that and they’ve been doing that for hundreds of years. We went to the hard drive manufacturers and showed them the technology. One company was very receptive. That was Seagate.

We just recently partnered with Seagate. It’s been three or four months since we signed a partnership agreement with them. They started to put our technology on their Barracuda 515 SSD. Our firmware is embedded alongside their firmware. Of course, you have to use our software to turn those one.

Sramana Mitra: When Seagate is selling their hard drives, they’re not paying you any royalties?

John Benkert: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Then you have to go sell to people whom they have sold to to sell your software.

John Benkert: They are paying us a royalty.

Sramana Mitra: Do they introduce you to the customers that are buying their product?

John Benkert: Yes. We’re total partners. We introduce them to folks. They introduce us to folks. That’s how we work. It’s been a great partnership. That’s the model that we had envisioned. We also partnered with Digistore. It’s a smaller manufacturer and sells hard drives to the government.

Our market is government-focused because that’s where I come from and I understand the needs there. We just started to transition out to the commercial market. We have our new ransomware-proof hard drive. That comes out at RSA this year.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent
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