Jim McGann, VP Marketing & Business Development at Index Engines discusses the significance of data for intelligent decisions in the area of cybersecurity.
1. Tell us about your role at Index Engines.
I am responsible for strategic partnerships and business development at Index Engines.
2. What are the applications or rather opportunities you seek to have with your product?
Our CyberSense product checks the integrity of data to ensure it has not been corrupted by a ransomware attack. This empowers clients to add a new layer of protection that ensures they can recover from an attack once data is corrupted. CyberSense will inform them of the last good backups that can be restored to recover.
3. How did you define the vision of Index Engines?
Index Engines provides knowledge and insight into corporate data and permits clients to make intelligent decisions in support of security, governance and management.
4. What are some of the unique lessons you have learnt from analysing your customer behaviour?
Most customers do not have enough knowledge of their data assets allowing them to streamline their business operations. Without this knowledge, organizations can not operate efficiently, and also eliminate downtime due to outside or inside threat actors.
5. What are some of the distinctive features of Index Engines? And how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
Index Engines has spent years developing an enterprise-class indexing platform that performs content-based indexing at large scales using efficient, purposebuilt technology. This indexing platform can process network data on primary storage, or uniquely backup data stored in proprietary backup images.
6. Index Engines was recently in the news a lot recently discussing ransomware and cyber security, and predictions. Can you elaborate more on the same or any of the recent news about cyber attacks?
Recently we have seen a significant cyberattack on the world-class cybersecurity organization FireEye, and also the US Federal Government. These attacks are coming from very intelligent and sophisticated nation-state actors. These attacks show that even the most protected data centers are vulnerable. This is a wake-up call to all organizations to not only continue to deploy security solutions that protect entry into the data center, but also protect the data.
When a threat actor wants to get into the data center, they will. Therefore, protect data assets from corruption and encryption.
7. What are some of the common pain points that your customers commonly approach you with?
They have already experienced ransomware attacks where it caused a significant impact on their operations. They need a new, disruptive approach that will allow them to avoid these downtimes. They have invested significantly in real-time security products and are still seeing attacks. This is the pain point and frustration that CyberSense is helping them solve.
8. What advice would you like to give to the upcoming tech start-ups?
Make sure your technology can be easily differentiated from other approaches in the market. Aim to deliver differentiating technology that will set you apart allowing organizations to easily understand how your solution is not already covered by other software they may have in house. Displacing software is a challenge without this differentiation.
9. Can you give us a sneak peek into some of the upcoming product upgrades that your customers can look forward to?
We continue to improve the product performance and speed in processing large-scale data environments and provide more insight into the content that allows organizations to streamline their business initiatives.
10. Which is the one tech breakthrough you will be on the lookout for in the upcoming year?
Reducing the impact of ransomware attacks, allowing organizations to minimize the impact of an attack and avoid business interruption. These attacks will continue in 2021 and minimizing the impact will slow the spread of these attacks.
11. Please share a recent piece of content (can be a video, podcast, blog, movie, webinar) you liked that set you thinking about in general?
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/597684/sandworm-by-andy-greenberg/
Most of what we see and hear from clients is the end result of ransomware. This book is a fascinating behind the scenes view into cyber criminals and what is taking place in Russia.
12. What is the one quote that has stayed with you throughout your professional life?
Always have admired the work of Steve Jobs – “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”
Jim McGann
VP Marketing & Business Development at Index Engines
Jim has extensive experience with the eDiscovery and Information Management in the Fortune 2000 sector. Before joining Index Engines in 2004, he worked for leading software firms, including Information Builders and the French based engineering software provider Dassault Systemes.
In recent years he has worked for technology based start-ups that provided financial services and information management solutions. Prior to Index Engines, Jim was responsible for the business development of Scopeware at Mirror Worlds Technologies, the knowledge management software firm founded by Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University. Jim graduated from Villanova University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
