Today we wrap up the report from our discussion with Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt on the topic of projections in the world of CyberSecurity in 2014. 

SiliconANGLE: Please share some thoughts on Good Technology’s role in a better CyberSecurity profile in 2014

Wyatt: Good Technology is very happy with the company’s growth trajectory.  The reasons behind that growth have been are numerous – it’s a technology that has been very tested, very broadly deployed and scaled within the industry.  We’ve grown our active user base by over 50% over last three quarters.  There are a couple of notable trends that are fueling that growth.  Clearly we’re in the midst of this mobility movement, but things are shifting to a platform-driven mobility approach, so instead of buying smartphones for 10-15% percent of people within your organization, you can publish tools and apps for all your employees.  Mobility is becoming part of the fabric of an organization and some cases much more than that.  We see growth across the board not just in number of companies, but in the variety as well.  It used to be that such a large part of this mobility and security base would come out of regulated companies like banking, government, health and so on.  Now that represents about 50% of the base, yet its growth hasn’t stopped and it has in fact been joined by customers in virtually all markets and verticals.  So it’s no longer just the banking/regulated industries we’re talking about here.

Our plan is always to become a part of the strategic board room conversation.  That’s because mobility enables business transformation.  If you look at the industry as a whole the number of companies really considering mobility as a transformative tool is perhaps 5%.  Our customers go way beyond that.  It started with the regulatory market, where conversations about where data goes are top of the list concerns, and it’s always been a part of all our customer’s conversations but it goes to another level when it comes to transformation.  We are in global 2000 organizations and while we are not classically an SMB-focused solution, heightened sensitivity about where data goes is a big concern, so we’ve penetrates every type of customer in the business.   From NIST cybersecurity frameworks to a variety of policies there are many great things that are emerging with implementing our technology.

Very recently the PCI standards were updated.  There has been some criticism on the mobility portions of those regulations, but when you consider the scope of mobility, it is much wider than what could be addressed by regulatory group.  It would be lost and outdated rather quickly.  In Europe and Asia there’s just too much variety there alone.  Their take on mobility bases strategy on giving control to customer, making it a difficult regulatory hurdle.  Things are best kept flexible in this regards, so it can be adapted to these and other situations.

SA: What’s on deck for Good Technology and what will the company lineup look like at the end of 2014?

Wyatt: We’re always pushing forward and our focus for 2014 is to be even more customer driven.  In our decision to embrace and win mobile, we time our releases around customer implementations.  We take an approach of no technical limitations.  Things don’t necessarily have to be mobile or have a UI.  There’s an emerging market for M2M as well we are excited about, and it answers the question of how to allow data to move freely and security in this mobile to mobile world.

This customer focus means a drive around the user experience and leaning on the lessons learned for our industry.  In the meantime, user experience and security need to coexist.  Blackberry was a pioneering MDM solution and they had a huge play on hardware.  The system ended up with organ rejection and part of the reason behind that were these constructs for example where things were unnecessarily restrictive.  People would find workarounds to do things like text and do the things they want to do.  We approach these questions – this balance of functionality, user experience and security at the data level in a more elegant way.

Another big area of investment is in that very same user experience but it focuses on creating consistent experiences.  Device diversity is growing and you are seeing more and more Android flavors, types of devices, more Microsoft devices and so on.  Support personnel within the organization can’t say which version of the very many Android level they are actually supporting.  So the approach through this is standardizing apps across platforms.  The goal is to get to that very elegant, scalable, and easy manage solution that is not only great from a user experience perspective, but is also supportable to the five ‘nines’ of reliability.  In order to be enterprise-grade apps, they simply can’t go down.

SA: One would assume security is a big part of that as well, what challenges are there on that level?

Wyatt: Developers need to be more savvy that security has to be part of their architecture.   From corporate secure platforms into the dev toolset – yet it’s not realistic to think developers can fend off attacks on their own.  When you can put the kind of architecture developers need out there, the tools they need within reach, then this is an opportunity to do this better.  They now have the ability to work with enterprise customer base where they couldn’t do so before.

The nature of this business always had this element of surprise. So it’s important for our business to have this agility, and interestingly, this is a constant based on core fundamentals – agility.  This is one of the reasons why large enterprise mobile desktop solutions won’t work on mobile.   They just don’t have the agility to respond from these big monolithic platforms.  Our take is that just like we see mobility innovations that emerge and move fast, our abilities in security and features have to move just as fast. The big thing is that we have to be concerned with cybersecurity but not to the point where you miss out from the benefits of mobility – that is what we’re delivering, the answer for both.