Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In these kinds of conversations, I always ask for open problems that new entrepreneurs can solve. One of the problems that come to my mind is, I live a public life. The problem is all these fraudsters are able to access my entire LinkedIn following. I have all these LinkedIn followers who, to some degree, trust me.

I’m just using myself as a proxy. There are lots of people out there on other platforms. If the fraudsters use these brands and start phishing, that’s a very dangerous scenario. We are not doing anything to protect our followers because there’s no solution available. Even if I wanted to, I have no way of protecting my followers from this kind of phishing.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you resolve that dichotomy?

Bill Bruno: One, you or someone pretending to be you is logging in. Let’s use an example that just happened with one of our customers. They had a situation where there was a large scam attempt where several users were receiving messages that were pretending to be the bank.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 2)

Bill Bruno: Another thing that’s picked up in the last few years because of the speed of digital transformation is fraudsters trying to take advantage of that. We have a customer that’s using both systems – our marketing system and our fraud system. In many ways, you can look at it as a hand-off. On the marketing side, we’re helping eliminate friction.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Bill Bruno, CEO of D4t4 (Part 1)

With more people on the Internet and more connected devices, the touchpoint for Cyber Fraud is increasing exponentially. We deep dive into problems, solutions, open problems, and entrepreneurial opportunities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Bill Bruno: I’m the CEO of D4t4 Solutions. It’s a publicly-traded company out of the UK. I’m based in Chicago. Our company is focused on helping clients activate and make better use of data across all of their digital touch points.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 5)

James Winebrenner: The second thing is not going at it alone. All of these companies that we want to do business with can’t evaluate tens of thousands of vendors. The space changes rapidly. Much more so in security. Some of these segments are so small when they start.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Healthcare and manufacturing are two big segments where you are doing a lot of work.

James Winebrenner: Yes, we are starting to see acknowledgment of this need in traditional enterprise space. I met with a large investment bank in New York last week that has done micro-segmentation initiatives in their data centers, but they’re now moving back out into their campuses and looking at user segmentation and device segmentation in those environments. These are networks where we think about iPads and laptops, but we see everything from Peloton to process controllers. It’s becoming more of a challenge.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your primary insight is that you had the technical background, but you spent time building up sales and business model experience before you took the leap into entrepreneurship.

James Winebrenner: Yes.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 2)

James Winebrenner: The second principle was the ability to do segmentation across the network instead of sharing one network. There was a significant amount of interest in segmenting traffic by use case. In retail, we saw a lot of need for POS traffic to be segmented from real-time communications type traffic.

We saw the advent of a lot of third-party connectivity whether that was marketing organizations doing digital signage or contractors doing video surveillance. We didn’t start out focusing on those security use cases, but we saw them become a significant byproduct of the VSTN technology.

Sramana Mitra: Was that a consulting services company?