Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I understand what you’re doing. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. You have been in security for a long time. You said you’ve done four companies. Security is a domain where you can only do a startup if you really are a domain expert. When you look around at the current situation in terms of where we are in the industry of the Internet, cloud, and mobile, what are open problems that have caught your eye?

Right now, you are buried in doing CipherCloud and you’re busy. If you had a blank slate and you were thinking about a fifth company, what would be an open problem that you would consider working on?

Pravin Kothari: I usually look at the mega trend. Cloud is still going to reach $200 billion by 2020. This is a huge opportunity for a lot of companies to figure out where the problem is. There are a lot of issues with cloud itself.

Sramana Mitra: Such as?

Pravin Kothari: Such as getting more visibility and getting more control. That is a huge issue. Encryption is one solution. Machine learning to look at all the activities – a lot of things can be done there. The cloud is in the very early stages. That’s one area for sure. Another mega trend you can see is Internet of Things. Internet of Things also will need huge security.

Sramana Mitra: The number of opportunities for exposing vulnerabilities with an IoT architecture is very high.

Pravin Kothari: That’s correct. That’s another big area opening up for entrepreneurs. You can also apply the existing security to the new mega trends or you can come up with something completely different.

Sramana Mitra: You talked about Palo Alto Networks and FireEye earlier. There’s another company that we cover—Dasqualis. What other interesting security companies are you tracking?

Pravin Kothari: There are many security companies out there. There are companies like CloudFare, Splunk, and OpenDNS. Then you also have Palo Alto and FireEye.

Sramana Mitra: I think Palo Alto and FireEye stand out. These are very strong companies. They have broken out of the pack.

Pravin Kothari: Right. They are two big ones.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari
1 2 3 4 5