While spending time among the crowds at the RSA Conference earlier this month, I crossed my four week mark of joining the team at HelpSystems (now Fortra). The recurring theme that's filling my inbox daily, not only from our teams but our customers too is: “What does our future look like?” It seems like a good time to share what has influenced me, and how I plan to shape the future of data protection here going forward.

The most exciting reasons I joined HelpSystems fell on three main points. First, they had assembled some of my favorite tools in the data protection space and after speaking to multiple people here, they explained that the reason behind that was because they wanted to be the leader in data protection. The technology world is filled with acquisitions daily and nobody can ever be sure the motivation behind why company A bought company B but in this case, it was to build the best suite of tools to help our customers with their data protection problems.

I've been a vendor in the past and have lost count of the number of tools/products I’ve built (and finished). Over the last decade I've been a customer of these products, partnering with company legal, privacy, and compliance teams and listening to the problems they deal with on a daily basis.

This brings me to exciting reason number two I joined HelpSystems: We as an industry have not solved the data protection issues that still plague companies across the globe!

Having just returned from RSA, I had the chance to wander the vendor floor and listen to the sales pitches from a dozen or so companies as I had in the past (this time as a vendor). It was ironic that two vendors (!) had replicas of the DeLorean from the movie Back The Future in their booths, because I had to double check myself to see if I had been transported back to 2012. Story after story still focused on what was originally sold for data protection/data loss prevention 10 years ago.

Exciting reason number three that I joined HelpSystems: Every data protection plan requires a foundation and that foundation is a flexible data loss prevention platform like Digital Guardian. With almost two decades in the DLP space, the team at Digital Guardian has the experience HelpSystems needs to take that next step in solving the modern problems our companies face.

HelpSystems did not stop there. By adding the two industry leading data classification platforms, Titus and Boldon James, when combined with Digital Guardian, the experience these three teams bring to our data protection platform is astonishing.

The digital icing on our data protection cake came with Digital Guardian Secure Collaboration. Our solution has innovative tools that provide users a way to collaborate on files that were secured by six years ago! It is a product that our compliance teams need to see and understand, as DRM will allow businesses to continue to support their customers in a seamless and secure environment, that in our heavily regulated world, is essential to survival.

The data protection space has come a long way, but it's not done. Since the gaps in data protection have not been solved, that is our focus. In the coming months, I will share our thoughts as we embark on the next phase of data protection and where it is leading us.  

Am I excited? Have you ever seen a five year old standing at the entrance gates of Disneyworld?