UPDATED 12:55 EDT / DECEMBER 13 2013

NEWS

Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt on Security and Mobility in 2014

The world of mobility has many elements and there are no shortage of solutions built to deal with the issues that organizations deal with.  What is scarce however are solutions that actually answer all of these problems well, and there are few if any companies that are doing mobility as well as Good Technology.  They are constantly adding features and functionality at a pace like no other.  Whether we’re talking about deeper integration, better granularity, a development in the API, or a fresh set of new features, they can always be counted for some news as they’re always pushing the envelope.  Today we feature Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt, who has shared some thoughts on Cybersecurity in 2014 and beyond.

SiliconANGLE: Cybersecurity in 2014 – What does it look like, what are the big threats we should be aware of?


Christy Wyatt:
You’re going to get a lot of responses on this, but one of the biggest is denial, particularly around mobility.  It’s important for this message to get out there – it’s not a question of if an organization is going to be attacked, it’s a question of when.  There are still many companies that assume they’re not a target, that they are safe because of the measures they have taken and that it hasn’t happened to them before.  For us, it’s an interesting landscape.  There are many who mainly rely on ActiveSync and that’s just not enough you have to do more.  The threats are more sophisticated.  A big chunk of companies are still in that camp.  In the meantime, an increasing number of companies are experiencing serious incidents, it’s happening everywhere.   Data is leaking because of poor mobile strategy.  The other big thing out there is that the desktop still has this position as the entry point for the enterprise.  So we’re still dealing with the challenge and hassles of things like desktop malware.  Those operating systems and the security measures built around them are quite antiquated, very little has evolved really.  So we’re seeing this trend emerging of organizations racing towards mobile adoption because it is more secure than the desktop.  You have things like trusted hardware execution, modern security strategies and those things shore the picture up.

SA: There’s so many threats out there and different actions that drive all of these.  Cybercrime is on the rise, there’s hacktivism, pranksters, state-sponsored outfits – Given all of this perhaps you could illustrate your picture of the prepared organization versus the unprepared organization and the consequences of missing those marks.

Wyatt: In security there is no such thing as done.  There is no complete definition and risk mitigation is an ongoing task in an organization. The savvy, prepared organization is going to be thinking about their security in layers and they consider this through the perspective of the device, of protecting the data and going beyond the firewall.  Most successful organizations we see start with securing the data with a data-focused security model .  From there they can take on securing their way through components such as the device, then the network, personnel, contractors and vendors.  Healthy organizations look at these things from all these focus points as part of their security strategy on a regular basis.  The good news is that there’s an emerging ecosystem and partners that are coming up to help.

SA: That’s a great point.  Is there enough technology and personnel to meet all of these threats right now?

Wyatt: The technology certainly has to fit your particular needs, that’s the big thing.  There is however a significant challenge on the personnel front.  In today’s market the truth is that if you find good engineer – especially in mobile that understands mobile development and understand enterprise processes, well you’re going to be competing for that engineer with everyone else that needs one of those.   Our platform Good Dynamics is designed to answer the security needs in mobile platform approach – because there’s problems with ISV ecosystem.  Organizations quite simply don’t have enough capacity to test, to pen test, on every piece of software, every element, basically every single thing that touches the workflow of an organization.   That’s one of the ways our product helps answer the call on that personnel front, by making these things possible with better security.

We’ll be back with Wyatt where she discusses Good Technology’s future, what they’re working on next, and why their service can never go down.


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