Active Cypher- Securing the Data Supply Chain

Active Cypher- Securing the Data Supply Chain Michael Quinn The Enterprise World

The FBI reports that cybercrime has increased by over 300% since the beginning of the pandemic. Not only can data breaches cause financial losses and disrupt business continuity, but reputational damage can be even more costly. Yet, data protection has not traditionally been a focus of security architecture. Cybercriminals pass through our strong perimeters in ways that appear effortless and steal unprotected data. We must shift our attention to enabling the data to protect itself and make cybercrime almost impossible.

Featuring The Enterprise World’s this issue of The Best Cybersecurity Service Providers in 2022 is Active Cypher, a data security organization helping you to secure the data supply chain.

The Company-

It’s time for a comprehensive Data Loss Prevention solution that provides security and protection across both internal and external network environments.

“We provide simple, user-friendly, cost-effective DLP solutions that shield sensitive data assets while avoiding the pitfalls and closing the gaps left by other cybersecurity solutions.”

Active Cypher brings simplicity to the Data Loss Prevention space and fulfils its original promise of security and protection. They do this by providing baked-in, asset-level protection & security across the entire data supply chain, rendering sensitive data worthless to ransomware attackers and turning potential data breaches from catastrophes into inconveniences. In addition, Active Cypher places businesses in control of risk at the organizational level and restores the freedom to be effective at the individual level.

Overcoming the Challenges-

The security industry has evolved in a direction that lost sight of its goal. Instead of protecting critical information like strategic plans, intellectual property, personal information, etc., network security has focused on protecting and monitoring the digital infrastructure. Unfortunately, this focus has put organizations in a reactive mode that only provides the means to intervene in malicious threats after they have been initiated.

Efforts to protect data directly have been abandoned because they created an undue burden on the end-user and were onerous to administer. Instead, the focus has been on Data Loss Prevention, which requires highly complex data categorization, service rule development, and user education that is time-consuming and expensive.

The problems with this approach are that data security decisions are left to non-technical professionals who do not fully grasp the significance of the extra time and effort required to classify their files. Furthermore, service rules are developed to stop specific types of data from leaving the organization in data patterns or human behaviours that are known but are not dynamic enough to cover unknown scenarios.

Active Cypher puts Data First in the security architecture, enabling data to protect itself wherever you store it, wherever you send it, and maintain control of its privacy even after sharing.

“Our customers have made it clear that security must be simple or entirely transparent for users and administrators.”

Furthermore, it must be adaptable to any digital architecture, whether on-premise, cloud, or both.

The Growth Quotient-

The accelerated awareness of cybersecurity risk is forcing organizations to look closely at the effectiveness of their security architecture concerning return on investment. Most organizations had digital transformation plans that migrated aspects of their business to the cloud. COVID accelerated what was once a 1-4-year plan to 6 months. Remote work capacity had to be rapidly expanded, and security concerns were foremost on business leaders’ minds to confidently ensure business continuity and minimize risk.

Active Cypher is a Data Loss Prevention vendor specializing in protecting & securing data at the asset level across its lifecycle with far less complexity and cost. Their simple and effective approach redefines DLP by enabling data to be self-protected everywhere, even when firewalls and other security measures fail. The rapid acceleration of digital transformation across all industries provided the ideal environment for Active Cypher Solutions to protect what customers value most: the data.

Active Cypher was started with the concept that Data Protection was the primary goal of cybersecurity and the target of cybercriminals. Taking a Data First approach simplifies operational focus and changes how the industry thinks about Data Loss Prevention. Additionally, 80% of the world’s businesses run on Microsoft’s rich infrastructure, which they leveraged to create a seamless dynamic Data Protection solution. Active Cypher’s prototype was introduced to the market in 2019. As with most great ideas, operational experience in customer environments helped them shape their offering in a way that solves both tomorrow’s problems as well as today’s.

“Our customer base appreciated our future thinking approach but had issues they needed solving today.”

Their Products and Services-

Active Cypher provides comprehensive encryption, complete access control, and threat monitoring/remediation solutions for businesses that run on Microsoft technology. The team makes it possible for organizations to proactively secure their data from hacking, ransomware, and accidental disclosure at the business level. Unlike other DLP solutions, they do this using high-level policy frameworks rather than complicated service rules or time-consuming classification. As a result, employees are free to carry out their work efficiently rather than jumping through hoops to prevent the loss or exposure of sensitive information.

“We encrypt data at the individual file/object level within our clients’ own Microsoft Cloud environments, providing view-only access to users that never exposes source data and enabling businesses to remotely revoke access anywhere, anytime.”

Active Cypher

This means even a data breach does not mean a data loss. Active Cypher’s data security & protection solutions work across all systems to shield data at its creation point, at rest, or in motion in any environment, email, and file-sharing collaboration across any platform.

Active Cypher is the ONLY solution on the market that fulfils the original promise of data loss prevention at a fraction of the investment required to stitch together a similar level of protection using other solutions and methods.

Active Cypher’s services help organizations protect and secure information dynamically across the entire data supply chain. Their comprehensive encryption has no gaps because it works at the file level itself instead of only protecting data on a specific server, drive, or collaboration platform. No third-party trust is required.

“Your data stays 100% private and under your control.”

Michael Quinn- Leading the Way-

CEO

Michael’s career in data protection started in the Intelligence Community from the obtain vs. protect aspect. Data has always been the target, and today’s world has opened huge new arenas that lack real controls. In the late ’70s and the ’80s, it was an electronic wild west.

Critical changes that took the Intel world rushing from HUMINT (Human Intelligence) to ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) were moving at such a rate that every technology got a good review for how it operated and could be exploited. The winner’s learned the Zero Day design flaws allowed this exploitation. Today that is still the foundational key to that success. The research and development of DARPA Net, the Internet, and VOIP alone changed the security landscape. The users and IT/INFOSEC battled ease of use vs. higher-level security.

Michael went to cisco in 1991, seeing a very large market for Internet-driven data communications and already emerging demand for better protections that had not been addressed in the early migrations to TCP/IP-based solutions. He provided leadership to a unique group of people at cisco focused on the identification of product and the industry adoption of newer capabilities in video, file, and VOIP that required security.

“My career brought me to Microsoft to lead the Enterprise Cybersecurity Group, again focused on a similar goal as cisco.”

However, better minds still did not address the nagging issue of Data Protection at the file level that leveraged the existing systems and was simplistic for the users, IT, and the Business.

His interest in Active Cypher started with the idea that a simple, thoughtful solution allowing data to protect itself regardless of the point of creation, destination, and storage is possible. This data protection approach can and must coexist with environments that include XDR, EDR, and other automated controls. Active Cypher’s platform enhances the Microsoft ecosystem and expands to all cloud providers’ protection.

“I needed to be a part of this revolutionary approach.”

Michael’s Advice to the Budding Entrepreneurs-

“The best advice for any entrepreneur is not to fear failure. Try many things, fail quickly, and move on by leveraging the successful aspects of the experiment. A new business must quickly try different business models and not get bogged down with business infrastructure until you validate a successful model and then focus on scaling that success.

Entrepreneurs need to get away from their offices and have as much customer interaction as possible to validate concepts that solve significant business problems. The biggest mistakes are made early in a business by people that assume they know what the customer needs rather than working with customers to validate the value of solutions.”

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