Entrust President and CEO Bill Conner went to the airwaves to chat with David Johnson, of KRLD AM 1080, for a CEO Spotlight segment. Their discussion focused on three primary topics:
The Changing Threat Landscape
- In the not-too-recent past, there were only several thousand new malware variants a day; today, there are now 300,000-plus hitting the street every 24 hours
- Old techniques of defense are inadequate against today’s advanced and targeted attacks on digital identities
- Recent reports draw extra attention to the targets of cyber incidents being critical infrastructure and intellectual property
- No longer is the goal of a sophisticated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack massive data floods of sites and servers, but directed attacks on business applications
Risks, Challenges of Going Private
- Since going private in 2009 under Thoma Bravo, Entrust has enjoyed a successful transition from a perpetual, on-premise-based software company to seeing 50 percent of revenue come from subscription and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions
- Thoma Bravo has built a valuable information security portfolio since the acquisition: SonicWALL (later sold to Dell), Blue Coat Systems and Tripwire (acquired nCircle) to name a few
Government Involvement in Private-Sector Cybersecurity
- There is a lot of focus in the United States on government involvement in private-sector cybersecurity
- Recent positive steps by the Executive Branch and the appointment of NIST as the lead in standards is key
- NIST can help bridge the gap in the public and private sectors and push for open standards that allow for better products through constant improvement as well as a defined minimum to requirement standards
If you take a keen interest in cybersecurity, this is a worthwhile conversation. And, best of all, it won’t take too much of your time. Bill Conner, KRLD’s David Johnson Discuss Threats, Going Private and Government’s Involvement in Private Security.
