In this interview, David Sikora, CEO at ALTR elaborates on blockchain’s “digital truth”, why enterprises need to start treating data like they do their money, addressing data breaches in the midst of a digital initiative and stresses the need for a proactive rather than a reactive approach to security.
Question : Tell us about your product/business and your specific role?
Answer From David Sikora : I’m the CEO at ALTR, and have been in the tech industry for more than 20 years, including serving as the executive chairman at Stratfor, and leadership roles at Digby, Motive and Pervasive Software.
ALTR has been getting a lot of attention since recently emerging from nearly 4 years of stealth R&D. We have launched the first commercial software package that unlocks the security benefits of blockchain for the enterprise.
It may be useful to give you some context around why we have decided to launch ALTR. As more and more companies are jumping on board with cloud and IoT, new threat vectors to data are continually being introduced –Jupiter Research estimates the cost of these threats will exceed $8 trillion by 2022. It’s a toxic mixture of temptations and economic incentives that reward bad actors, who are always one step ahead of security providers, trapping them in a losing cycle of software patches and new applications.
That’s where ALTR comes in. Our platform is based on proprietary blockchain technology called ALTRchain. This is the first and only high-performance, enterprise-ready blockchain for data security. In fact, we are the first company to commercialize blockchain technology for this purpose and see this as a fundamental shift away from failed perimeter systems.
Question : What is the core issue your product/technology aims to address and what sets it apart from the other players in the market?
Answer From David Sikora : In our view, we have a choice between change or breach. Network-focused security isn’t enough because it can never reduce the sheer number of vulnerabilities. If the current “cyber security industrial complex” were so effective, then we have to ask ourselves “why are there so many breaches?” and “why are they happening with increased frequency?”
I mentioned that we spent 4 years in R&D creating the ALTR platform. It was the need to create a new security architecture that actually led us to blockchain, and not the other way around. Experts have been talking about the cybersecurity potential of blockchain for a long time. Rather than continually trying to put band-aids on the existing attack surface in an enterprise, we have found a way to reduce it to potentially zero using patent-issued blockchain technology. In the purest architectural sense blockchain has the capacity to create “digital truth” – we have harnessed this capability to allow an organization to monitor, govern and protect their critical data in ways that have not been done until now.
Question : What’s the one industry, sector or role that your technology is most relevant to?
Answer From David Sikora : I’ll answer this by focusing on a role. Our technology is the most relevant to the CEO and the Board of Directors at any large enterprise that houses sensitive data – either critical customer data or sensitive digital intellectual property.
The enterprise has to start treating its data like it does its money, meaning that the executive suite builds competency in understanding how it flows and what it means, makes policy for how it is used and accessed, and exerts control in governing and protecting it.
We’ve crafted a toolkit that deals with data in a way that stakeholders outside of IT can understand and manage.
Read the full interview of David Sikora, CEO at ALTR on The Digital Enterprise.
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