Profile on Enveil's Founder and CEO Ellison Anne Williams
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The company is unlike any other cybersecurity firm, Williams told FierceCEO. “We ensure data remains encrypted throughout the entire processing lifecycle, allowing organizations to achieve previously impossible levels of data security.”
Enveil does this by focusing completely on the use of data, while others focus on at-rest or in-transit data, Williams said. Enveil’s is a better approach because the latter two are exposed to being unencrypted during processing, Williams said.
The one-and-a-half-year-old company works with financial and healthcare companies as well as those in the data aggregator space. Enveil is venture capital-backed and mixes Williams’ love of mathematics with her family background. “I come from a long line of entrepreneurs and was the first technical person in my family,” she said. “I went and got a Ph.D. in mathematics because I felt it was a fun thing to do.”
Williams went on to work at the NSA for 12 years as an applied research mathematician before starting Enveil. She says the biggest cyber challenge today “is the unknown; with so many unique attack surfaces, it’s impossible to know what the next vulnerability will be. Instead of taking proactive measures, much of the industry revolves around patching and playing catch-up.”
There was “a great example of a new attack surface exposure last month with the announcements surrounding the chip flaws,” Williams said. “Who would have thought, in the commercial world, that we had such a broad and serious memory vulnerability across the Intel chipset, which is everywhere? And if that’s the case, what’s coming down the pike next?”
Read the full FierceCEO profile.
