Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 1)

Jeff provides a window into the remote access world through this interview, a world that is vastly more complex today than it used to be.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to SecureLink.

Jeff Swearingen: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of SecureLink.

Sramana Mitra: What does SecureLink do?

Jeff Swearingen: We make a platform for third-party remote access, serving highly-regulated industries.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take a few use cases from your customer base and tell us what customer problem you are solving and how you are solving that problem using your technology in a fairly detailed format.

Jeff Swearingen: I’d start with the backdrop in agreeing with Marc Andreessen that software is eating the world. Every company is becoming a technology company and a software company. Whether you’re an oil company or a hospital, you rely heavily on technology and it would be even more so in the future.

As software runs your business, it’s also complicated. It needs care and feeding from the technology vendors that keep it up and running and therefore keep your business up and running. In the old days when I first got into technology and dinosaurs roamed the earth, we used a thing called modem for third-party remote access.

For your listeners that aren’t familiar with that technology, it was a telephonic way to make a connection. A person doing an upgrade of a piece of software or doing some troubleshooting could make a connection. Nobody really liked the modem but everybody agreed it was the one and only way for a third-party to make a remote connection to do support. From the customer’s perspective, if they weren’t comfortable with the modem, they could unplug it. That was pretty simple.

Today, data is spread all over. It’s not all on-premise anymore. It has moved from on-premise and cloud. There’s an explosion of technologies that allow people to make remote connections. SecureLink, 15 years ago, stepped into this void as the modems were being unplugged and built a purpose-built solution to manage third-party remote access, specifically for privileged credentials.

When most people think about remote support, they think about an end user doing technical troubleshooting. For example, I was helping my mom with some digital photos on her camera. I wouldn’t use SecureLink for that. I would use something like WebEx where I can control her desktop. Where SecureLink specializes are complex applications – the big back office systems that run hospitals, banks, casinos, and the highly-regulated industries where one or more technicians may need privileged access to do the things that are required to keep enterprise software running.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink
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