This is promotional content. Learn more.
A Their Story interview with Sean Martin & Marco Ciappelli
Guest: Paul Russert, VP of Marketing, SecurityFirst
The organization telling us their story today is SecurityFirst.
As it often happens, when we do not know who the author is for an excellent wisdom quote, we attribute to Confucius. This quote below doesn't belong to him either, but we certainly cannot deny the value and truth that comes with it:
"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."
Most cybersecurity professionals we meet seem to have followed their passion when they stepped into this job—this career. Yes, this is the case for our today's guest—Paul Russert—who was blessed with an early retirement opportunity from the tech industry and found himself filling his time volunteering for Habitat for Humanity as a construction leader. While fulfilling, Paul realized that, after three years, he had "nobody to play with," and he needed to go back for more.
The driver to select information security as the "something more" to do was rooted in two events:
1) Paul's government security clearance was included in the OPM breach, and;
2) a former colleague of Paul's called him to ask him to join his cybersecurity start-up.
Paul was ready for the change—and the challenge—and made the jump back into the corporate world.
He is now helping organizations protect the data they have with a solution that connects intelligent encryption with in-depth access control capabilities on top of existing identity management tools. This ensures that only those with approved access are allowed to see the data through an agreed set of applications bound to the time(s) specified within the approved policies.
Setting aside key management for the moment, this may seem like a fairly straight-forward problem to solve—apply encryption to hard drives and file systems, and you're all set, right? Not so fast. With the unstoppable push to API-enable, everything companies are finding it difficult to manage access control, encryption, and searchable decryption within their connected application stack. And that's where SecurityFirst comes into play.
Have a listen to our conversation as we understand the details for some of the challenges organizations are facing in light of this new API-driven world we live in; a topic that needs to be addressed full-on as we try to find that perfect balance of capability and security driven by our a newfound desire to protect our personal privacy.
It is not a natural balance to find, but encryption seems so be the leveling tool.
Listen up and think about it.
