Accellion CEO Yorgen Edholm shared some projections about enterprise security and cloud computing for 2014.  2013 was a year that was marked by a lot of security breaches including: February’s onslaught of hacks for Facebook, Twitter and Apple, the obvious – NSA scandal and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal hacks, and Edholm feels this history will provide some key points for what road cybersecurity takes this year.  With that, enterprises will not only be concerned with the NSA in 2014, but will also be concerned with a new form of war that’s being waged in the unseen territory of cyber space. This of course changes the enterprise landscape to some degree, and trends that will emerge will include innovation in hardware to heighten security and a focus on security big-data analytics via mobile.  Accellion has been in the business of raising a foundation of government level security, providing enterprise-class mobile solutions with a focus on compliance and security worldwide.  The company has worked closely with government agencies such as the US Senate, NASA, SEC and others on secure file sharing solutions.

Edholm states that throughout all the various threats out there and ways to approach them, the biggest threat to the industry is human nature.  Unfortunately, it’s a problem that intensifies when things are moving fast – which is what you see in situation after situation.  The industry is moving at a frenetic pace, and despite best efforts, Edholm feels that we’ll see major leaks continue to rise, in spite of best efforts.  We can expect to see continued breaches and data leaks and though always unexpected, there will probably not be another Edward Snowden-level event in the cards for 2014.

Mobile means abilities while being secure

There’s good news however as new solutions and innovations will help those organizations that prepare to act against risks.   One big challenge that organizations face is making the enterprise more responsive and more able, while still encompassing security and compliance.  That’s a big challenge and it’s one of the things Accellion does for the most demanding situations.   Even for those organizations that put systems in place end up finding out that the variety of devices out there is still challenging, not just in terms of security, but functionality.  Among Apple devices alone, there is a good deal of variety and today the Android device is actually much more like a PC than people really talk about.

On the state of security, Edholm feels that the name of the game is education.  Everyone needs it, but no one really gets enough.  Accellion is constantly setting up what they call safety nets, built in reaction to the intensity of business climates, where speed and ease of use is at a premium.  Accellion has to be incredibly compelling on security points and that is based on communication, leadership and great delivery.

Accellion is constantly responding to conditions out in the world of security.  For example a recent new product that had reached FIPS compliance, a high level of government certification has been a very successful product.  At one point the product was on the market for six months, and rumors started to emerge about an entirely new level of threat.  Accellion launched an investigation and determined that though nothing had happened on their platform, they reacted by updating their algorithms to make sure nothing could be breached.  Accellion is about to announce a breakthrough in software security where will be able to create multi-tier layered software architecture on their platform.  The approach is designed to prevent loss in the event of one layer being breached, whether at the web layer, app layer or the inner-most data layer.  As with all their products, Accellion looks out for ease of use and security – state of the art not just pushing the envelope.