Doing some digging into our board, and as promised will share below.
Firstly, a bit of boring Wikipedia on what Public Key Infrastructure is, so we're all on the same page;
A
public key infrastructure (
PKI) is a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke
digital certificates[1] and manage public-key encryption.
The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email. It is required for activities where simple passwords are an inadequate authentication method and more rigorous proof is required to confirm the identity of the parties involved in the communication and to validate the information being transferred.
[2]
So Mr. Epstein was in charge of the
global PKI
as well as the companies Cryptography Engineering Department.
In laymans terms, he ran the group that designed the crypto for the PKI, and then oversaw the PKI.
Pretty impressive credentials so far.
I think it's more interesting where he was before this.
In a nutshell, Venafi secures and protects keys and certificates so they can’t be used in cyber attacks. Sounds simple, but for big corporations this is effectively the first and most important form of protection for secured data transfer. Huge industry, and Venafi state on their website that they are the worlds leaders.
What's also very, very, very interesting to note is their technology partners (their definition of their technological partners is as follows)
"partner products and Venafi products" - ie: building Venafi into partners products for secure encryption.
You then go on to look at the list of technology partners;
The list is much larger than that, but these are the take home,
multi national organisations.
And, what was Mr. Epsteins role at Venafi again? CIO and Head of Operations - he also personally overlooked the
customer support side of operations. So it's safe to assume he had / has working relationships with the heads of Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft ...
Now, to put it into perspective, Mr. Epstein would have most definitely been poached from his role at Venafi to oversee the PKI rollout and Crypto group at Bank of America - we're talking
big dollars.
He's left this role, with a 6 figure bonus, to head up our little spec minnow ... but this is where it gets really, really interesting, and I'll steal from my presentation yesterday talking about Zyber's development agreement with Teradici;
Teradici are the inventors of PCoIP - in a nutshell, instead of transmitting "data", PCoIP transfers a virtual image from the data centre - the information never leaves the data centre, meaning it is not open to malware intrusion. All technical, but it does offer a layer of extra protection and reduces the negligent end user (basically what Zyber is aiming to do).
So; Zyber has entered into a development agreement with Teradici. It would be interesting to see some of the corporations that Teradici has partnered with / currently work with. Here's a list.
Amazon Web Services
Cisco (yes, Cisco)
Racktop
Fujitsu
HP
IBM
DELL
LG
So here we are again - IBM and Cisco. Two companies which Mr. Epstein had a working relationship with at Venafi, and all of a sudden we are in a development agreement with Teradici, who is currently working with Cisco and IBM amongst others.
The only way I could make things more clearer is by getting the crayons out and drawing a picture - having Clay Epstein at the helm is epic, and I personally see things moving ahead much faster than people are expecting.
That's it for now, thanks for reading.
