Q&a With Pravin Kothari, Founder and CEO of Ciphercloud

This will be the first “post-NSA” RSA conference, how have the Edward Snowden revelations changed the cybersecurity landscape?

Pravin Kothari CipherCloud

The Snowden revelations highlighted the extent of the government’s surveillance capabilities. This has driven three shifts:

• Acceleration of a data-centric strategy for protecting cloud applications. Data moving from on-premise to the cloud and then from app to app highlights that protection strategy needs to focus on the data versus an endpoint approach. Enterprises are discovering that a data-focused approach to discovery to cloud applications provides deep intelligence and security.
• Encryption has found its killer app. Encryption has existed since antiquity (see infographic below). The last major breakthrough was SSL, which paved the way for e-commerce to thrive. Now, third party access to data in the clear has highlighted the need for cloud data encryption, which is the foundation of the CipherCloud platform.
• Security has moved from the IT to the board room. In turn, this has spurred investigation and adoption of innovative technologies (like the “discover, protect, monitor” platform we announced today) targeted at getting detail information about your personally identifiable information, protecting it and monitoring compliance of it in the cloud.

Cloud, mobility and risk will dominate the RSA discussion. Are there other areas that the agenda missed?

A related issue is that of big data, which I see as both a cause for concern and as a security solution when used right. The more data an enterprise creates, shares and stores, the more burden it has to ensure security and compliance. However, as is the case with Splunk, HP ArcSight, my former company, and other log analytics companies, it is also possible to leverage big data to tighten security. As data bandwidths grow, more companies will need to leverage big data analytics.

History of Encryption