2018 Leet List Profile: Ellison Anne Williams

Excerpt: "There are few things more sacrosanct in enterprise cybersecurity than the mandate to encrypt your data. Be it at rest or in transit, there are myriad ways for an enterprise to lock down its digital information. But what happens when you actually are processing your data?

That’s where Ellison Anne Williams and EnVeil come in. Williams has developed a way to protect data even while it’s in use. The tech, spun up out of the intelligence community, now gives enterprises a full scope of protection.

Williams talked with us about EnVeil, how the company has dealt with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, and the ways enterprises can protect the legacy systems that work with their delicate data."

CyberScoop: Tell us a little more about EnVeil and how it fits into the cybersecurity ecosystem. 

 Ellison Anne Williams: We definitely focus on a very unique area of data security. Within data security, we close a very large gap around securing data when it’s being used or processed.

There are three elements of what we call the “data security triad” — securing data at rest, which is your standard file-based encryption.  The second piece is securing it in transit, when it’s moving through the network. And finally, securing it when it’s being used or processed.

Historically the place that you see people creating products in data security has been at rest or in transit. That includes companies like, Gemalto, Thales, etc. We are complementary to all kinds of products and solutions in that space. We partner with companies. In fact, we just announced a partnership with Gemalto. But that’s not our primary focus. There’s a huge vulnerability space even if you do a fantastic job in the other two areas when you go use or process data. Because up until this point, there was no good technical way to address that gap and there really hasn’t been any commercial solution in that space. So we developed some very unique capabilities to lock data down when it’s being used or processed, used it inside of the intelligence community, then brought that out to commercialize in through Enveil.

Read the full profile.