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Trends in UC&C, Essential Differentiators Between Platforms, and the Critical Role of Security – Futurum Tech Webcast Interview Series

This week’s episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, featured an interview with Cisco’s Niraj Gopal. Niraj is the Director of Project Management for Webex Enterprise Security and Compliance and “owns” the 360 degree approach to Webex security, which spans so many things.

In our conversation today we explored trends in online collaboration and communications platforms, some key differentiators between platforms, how COVID-19 has changed the way we work (and live), and what’s going on in the enterprise leaders’ minds as it relates to the security afforded by these platforms.

Before we get to that, let me tell you a bit about Niraj. He is responsible for all things related to enterprise security and compliance at Webex, including identity management, end-to-end encryption of customer content, Data Loss Prevention, the DPL/CASB partner ecosystem, mobile device security, third party platform certifications, and security policy controls in Control Hub. With more than 20 years of experience in enterprise security management, the creator of a number of innovative products, and the holder of 7 patents (and counting), he’s a self-described fanatic when it comes to solving customer problems. That’s probably why we get along so well — I’m a bit of a fanatic about that myself.

Our conversation revolved around some primary research our team at Futurum recently published, in partnership with Cisco: Unified Communications & Collaboration, the Essential Differentiators for 2020 and Beyond and Unified Communications & Collaboration, the Primacy of Security, Privacy and Trust.

Our conversation was a wide-ranging one, including discussion of the following:

  • Trends in online collaboration since COVID-19 changed the way we work, including security issues.
  • In spite of a lot of news about security breaches of online meeting platforms, we don’t hear about that much as it relates to Webex. What is Cisco doing differently?
  • Besides what users can do to protect their own data, thoughts on what IT and security admins can do to make sure that data doesn’t get breached, especially in persistent messaging.
  • What vendors can do to help prevent and protect against data breaches.
  • How work from home has changed the workload for IT admins, and what they can do to ensure the safety of devices being used by remote employees.
  • How visibility and control when users collaborate outside of their company is a critical part of data protection initiatives.
  • How E2E encryption safeguards meetings and why that’s more important today than ever before.
  • The evolving role of collaboration platforms in healthcare and what’s involved in delivering telehealth services remotely.

We wrapped up our conversation with a discussion about what’s next on the roadmap for collaboration security. Niraj brought a wealth of knowledge to the conversation around not only trends in UC&C, how vendors and platforms differ and why understanding those differentiators are important for enterprise leaders charged with making decisions around UC&C platforms and, last but never least, the role that security plays in all of this today and what to know and look for.

You can watch the video here (and subscribe to our YouTube channel while you’re at it)

or grab the audio from our conversation here:

And if you’re interested in a deeper dive on either UC&C trends and differentiators you need to know about and/or security as it relates to UC&C platforms, you can download our research reports here:

Unified Communications & Collaboration, the Essential Differentiators for 2020 and Beyond

Unified Communications & Collaboration, the Primacy of Security, Privacy and Trust

Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.

Read more analysis from Futurum Research:

Cisco Expands Free Webex Offering As COVID-19 Scare Continues 

Cisco Webex Announces Interop Partnership With Microsoft Teams 

Voicea Acquisition Makes Cisco Webex Even More Formidable 

Transcript:

Shelly Kramer: Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast. This is part of our interview series of conversations and our conversation today is all about shining a light on collaboration and security. We’re going to talk about trends in online collaboration and how a global pandemic has changed the way we work and the way we live and what that means as it relates to collaboration platforms and security. My guest today is Niraj Gopal, and he’s with Cisco WebEx. Niraj is the Director of Product Management for WebEx Enterprise Security and Compliance. Basically, the things that he owns as it relates to security and compliance, the list is so long. But I’m going to tell you a little bit about what he does and which is why I was so interested to have this conversation.

He owns the 360 degree approach to WebEx security, which spans identity management, end to end encryption, data loss prevention, the DPL CASB partner ecosystem, mobile device security, third party platform certifications, and then security policy controls in what’s called Control Hub. As if that’s not enough, he’s got 20 years of experience in enterprise software product management, he’s created a number of innovative products, he holds seven patents, by the way, I have zero. And he has a reputation for being a fanatic when it comes to solving customer problems.

So that last part is really why we are kindred spirits because I too am fanatic when it comes to solving customer problems. So welcome, it’s so great to have you.

Niraj Gopal: Thank you, Shelly. Glad to be here.

Shelly Kramer: Isn’t the worst thing when somebody goes through your bio? I’ve stood on so many stages, done so many interviews and every time it’s just like, “Ugh, how quickly can this be over?” So, anyway, I’m sorry, but those things are all really important, so I wanted to make sure our audience really knows how awesome you are.

So one of the things I want to talk about before we get into our conversation is that we have, here at Futurum Research, partnered with Cisco on a couple of pieces of original research that has been recently released. And we did two separate studies and we developed two separate papers. One of them is called, Unified Communications and Collaboration, where we looked at the essential differentiators for 2020 and beyond, as it relates to collaboration platforms. And then we looked at collaboration and communication platforms and the role that security and privacy and trust play. And how important they are in the enterprise space.

So from our research, one of the key findings that … and this is going to surprise nobody. The demand for enterprise grade, UC&C tools and services, has never been greater. 76% of the enterprises that we surveyed for our research said they expect to increase the use of collaboration tools in 2020, well no joke. And 74% expect that increasing to continue on into 2021. In addition, 61% of the enterprises that we spoke with said that they’re expecting to spend more this year to keep employees, partners, and customers connected and collaborating. And I think it’s a fair assumption that that increase is going to continue on into 2021. So with that, let’s talk a little bit about trends, what are the trends that you’re seeing in online collaboration since the pandemic has changed the way that we work? Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Niraj Gopal: Yeah, absolutely, Shelly. So like you mentioned, over 70% of the companies in the US and outside, all of a sudden just went remote as soon as the pandemic hit. So many of these companies hadn’t prepared for bulk of these workers to work remote. Which means many of these back office employees processing, let’s say credit card reports, mortgage application, or a bank, didn’t really have work laptops, work machines. So didn’t really have any software end point which will protect the data as these employees would start to work home. And these people would be working with partners outside and other customers as well, collaboration.

So data loss prevention on enterprise compliance is really top of the mind for these companies. Because you’re dealing with sensitive information, you’re dealing with intellectual property, you’re dealing with whole bunch of sensitive information. So that is a key challenge, concern that we hear from customers.

And the other one is more around you have some conversations which are sensitive, meetings which are sensitive, like board meetings, for example, acquisition related conversations. So now, I mean, you can’t have that all within the four walls of a conference room, everything has to be remote. So privacy and confidentiality of these meetings is becoming very critical for some of the C-suite level conversation, board meetings, et cetera. So these are some of the key trends that we are seeing outside.

Shelly Kramer: Oh, absolutely. One of the things that didn’t surprise us when we were doing this research was that a lot of companies told us that the way they made decisions in having to do such a rapid pivot because of the pandemic. And all of a sudden employees moving out of the workplace into their homes, regardless of what their work functions were. In many instances, what their policy was about collaboration platforms was simply, use whatever, use whatever you want. We don’t care, we don’t have time to think it, we don’t have time to worry about it. And conversations around data and security really weren’t happening because in most instances, people did not have a foundation for secure collaboration platforms. And so it was just really interesting to us, and again, not surprising, but interesting that the companies that we spoke with largely just let people figure it out themselves.

But I think that we’ve seen a shift in that from my own experience, I know that my kids, I have teenagers, twin teenagers who were in eighth grade last year. And almost all of their learning was done using Zoom. And then this year, their school has moved away from that collaboration platform, largely reputational, I know we’ll talk about that later. So what we’re seeing now, I think, is people being more mindful and more strategic as it relates to the decisions that they’re making with regard to collaboration platforms. Because they know that they can’t possibly continue on with the use whatever you want policy. I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense. Certainly as it relates to company data, customer data, employee data, I mean, it makes no sense at all.

So one of the things, again, from our research security is rapidly becoming the must have of must haves for anyone making decisions about what collaboration platforms to use. And 96% of enterprises that we spoke with said that it’s important that they trust their technology and services providers. Well, of course, that’s a no brainer. Another 83% of our respondents said that they only trust vendors and providers who are proactive and transparent as it relates to security threats and security issues and threats to user data. But, that said, there are still instances of security breaches. So let’s talk a little bit about meeting bombing or let’s just go ahead and call it Zoom bombing.

Aren’t you so glad that there’s not a term that says WebEx bombing? I mean, like that would just be … to me, to be Zoom, to be dealing with the fact that this is just a common phrase in our vernacular these days, would be a horrible thing. But I personally believe that they kind of earned that in the sense that I think it’s a company that really didn’t make security foundational when they were building their product. And they did a lot of things right, but I don’t think that you can build without security first. So, there aren’t breaches in the news as it relates to the WebEx product. So tell us what you and your team have done to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Niraj Gopal: Yeah, Shelly. So, bombing our meetings is really bad, especially for the attendees who are participating and loss of data that happens out of that. And like you mentioned, security is foundational in products. Anything that we design or build, before even we write a line of code, we keep security in mind, we do threat modeling. Think about the various scenarios this new work, new feature, new capability we’re working on, how could this be attacked from outside? And then we bridge those gaps and plug those holes. And then we build the capabilities. There’s a big security baseline, so all of these capabilities are built in.

And then we have certain things which are on by default. For example, all meetings will have password turn on by default, which means nobody from outside cannot just join it because they need to know the password. And then there are several other controls that we have turned on by default and we allow people to set up authentication so no guests can join in. Every meeting gets locked after a few minutes to start, and only the host will have to let you in. Essentially that’s another security capability and these capabilities and then any external candidates, external participant from your organization, they are automatically placed in the lobby. So they don’t just barge into the meetings, essentially. Your hosts will look into that and then has to admit those external unauthenticated guests to the meetings.

And then we have hundreds of controls within the platform, which allow you to customize the security to use risk profile. Every company is different, when somebody in a tech company, gaming company has a vastly different profile than somebody who’s a bank or insurance or a medical provider, for example.

Shelly Kramer: Right.

Niraj Gopal: So we allow users to customize the deployment, we give them the full set of controls, essentially. And this is how essentially we avoid all of these bombings of the meetings and security abusers.

Shelly Kramer: Well, I think that’s pretty important. I’ve never had a meeting be bombed and I hope not to. And the thing too, that I think is interesting is that a lot of instances of this happening are they don’t happen when people like you and I, who are tech savvy users, who are thinking about things like that. And it’s not because we’re necessarily smarter or better than anybody else, although we do use different platforms, of course. But it’s school room classes, it’s public meetings, it’s people who don’t really understand … Our team and I’m sure yours as well, we are 100% virtual and have been for a decade or more. We’re pros at communicating virtually and using collaboration platforms, so we understand the nuances. And unfortunately some of these instances have happened when people really aren’t and that’s really where it can be a huge issue.

Niraj Gopal: Exactly. And all these settings enabled by default are really good for people who are not that technical.

Shelly Kramer: Yeah. So I don’t have to think about protecting myself, it’s built in, it’s foundational. So let’s talk about … so of course users can protect their own data and we talked a little bit about that. But what about IT security admins? Of course they have a big role in making sure that data doesn’t get breached. And so what can and should vendors do to help protect against data breaches … or actually, let me ask it this way. If you’re in IT and you’re trying to make a decision as to what collaboration platform you want to use, and you want to recommend using. What is it that you should look for when you’re evaluating what the offerings are and what the key differentiators in platforms are? What should IT people look for?

Niraj Gopal: Yeah, absolutely. Like I mentioned, I mean, the key trends we see is data loss prevention. So these collaboration tools, a lot of sensitive data gets shared between the employees, whether that is your intellectual property, your acquisition plans, your three-year strategy and product definition blueprints, all of that information gets shared. So you don’t want that information to leak out, essentially. And you want to make sure right set of information is shared between the rights of individuals, whether within the company or outside.

So I would say, IT organizations should definitely focus on the DLP capabilities. And especially as collaboration tools move to the cloud, like any other for agility, performance and other reasons. So the new category of DLP tools has emerged in the marketplace, which is essentially CASB tools, cloud access security brokers. So you need to make sure that you have deployed those tools to protect other applications within your enterprise. Whether that is Office 365, Productivity Suite, whether that is enterprise file sharing platform like Box and others, Dropbox, et cetera. You want the same policies and the same tools to protect your collaboration tools as well. So that is going to be a key thing. So basically any tool that you’re settling on, make sure it can work with your existing DLP CASB tools. Because integration and bringing into a new tool just to protect your application is going to be super expensive, very difficult to manage. Especially in this day and age when IT has to do more with less, essentially.

Shelly Kramer: Right. I think the key here is that you don’t want a more complicated technology stack, you want the right technology solutions to begin with. I mean, that’s what we look at and write about and do research on. I mean the technology stack landscape is incredibly crowded and clouded. That was an unintentional pun. But I think that’s the key, is that you want it to be simple, you want it to be strategic, you want it to make sense. And so when you’re looking at things from that strategic overview and trying to make decisions on what to use, I think solutions that are just one more thing that we can plug in makes a lot of sense. And I hadn’t thought about that before.

Niraj Gopal: Exactly and these tools need to be essentially open, I mean, they can be a closed ecosystem. I only work with this partner, if you want to protect data, then you have to deploy that. It should be open and….

Shelly Kramer: Right.

Niraj Gopal: And work with the ecosystem that you got in your enterprise.

Shelly Kramer: Well, and I think that obviously these solutions need to be secure, they need to be cloud based, they need to be easy to use. And I think that you can get all those things, the right solution offers all of those things.

So let’s talk a little bit about work from home. You’re working from home, I’m working from home. Since most employees are working from home on mobile and many of them are using their devices, what should IT admins do, as it relates to the security and the safety of those devices? What do they need to be thinking about?

Niraj Gopal: Indeed, I mean, that is another critical item, especially because since you’re not using a corporate device, it doesn’t have the endpoint security software. And the whole stack that you use to protect your in-office desktops and office machines, now people are just using their home iPad, they’re personal machines and all their stuff. So you need to make sure … and especially with mobile devices, that’s a big challenge.

Shelly Kramer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Niraj Gopal: You need to make sure that the vendor provides their own built-in mobile application management capabilities. Some of the capabilities that we enable within the WebEx, as an example is even if you don’t have any MDM on the security end point software, we still have controls within our admin console control hub to say application wouldn’t even launch until you configure the pin lock. Which means if you lose your device or somebody steals it, unless they know the pin code, they can’t access your application.

And some of the other capabilities would be required and personal is if your device gets stolen, then somebody may get access to it. And then all the cache messages, the messages are still going to that device. So you need a capability to remotely wipe and clear that device and force log out that user, if there is a thief or an issue like that. So WebEx control hub enables you to do that. None of your other data, photographs, calendar, invoice, everything else stays exactly the same. All of these things are just built into the application. For example, you want to disable files. Mobile especially is a big challenge because people take screenshot, it’s not as secure as a desktop is. So having these controls around sharing of files and mobile controlling it, I think those are critical set of things that an application should have. And then we build those in the WebEx from the beginning, actually.

Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I think that’s really important. So, then going on the point of protecting users, a lot of times we did some recent research with another client on dashboards. I’m kind of throwing this to you out of the blue here. But visibility and control of what’s happening within the ecosystem is super important. And what our research showed us in this particular project that we just did, was that a lot of times companies think that they’re good, that they’re protected and everything else. And it’s largely companies who don’t have a dashboard kind of view into the whole ecosystem, that feel like they’re safe. Whereas people who are able to use a hub that shows them accessibility, that shows them the whole ecosystem, realize that threat detection, and I mean, there are threats coming at us all day, every day in the enterprise. And so talk to me a little bit just about visibility and control. And how important it is as it relates to collaboration platforms? And maybe what people need to think about as it relates to that.

Niraj Gopal: Indeed, yeah. So, IT administrators, compliance officers, legal teams, essentially, they do need visibility into the content that employees are sharing within the organization. You don’t want to block any employee, but then you still want to see what they’re doing. And if there violation, you want to note it down and found that you just violated a policy. All of those capabilities are definitely required.

And WebEx has built-in capabilities, we have a public API, events API, which gives you visibility outside into any tool that you want. And that visibility, and Shelly, the critical thing is, the important thing is that it gives you visibility even when you are talking with external organizations.

Shelly Kramer: Oh, that’s good.

Niraj Gopal: The tool or capability or product outside has this level of control. For example, if you and I are talking in a conversation, planning the center view, as an example. And I share some content, Cisco ID will have full control and visibility into what I’m sharing. And my policy would apply, even if you own the conversation. So this is really sort of super critical control that Cisco has, essentially, or any IT organization has.

Shelly Kramer: It’s kind of like contact tracing as it relates to fighting a global pandemic. That contact racing has proven to be pretty valuable. Maybe not in the US since we don’t really do very much of it, but in other countries. But this is kind of a form of data tracing, whether I originate the conversation, you originate the conversation. And just being able to keep a handle on what it is that shared. I didn’t know that and I think that’s really interesting.

Niraj Gopal: Yeah, that’s a good analogy, actually. And your organization has full control over whatever matters most to you. My organization has control over what is important to me. So I think that is best of both worlds, essentially.

Shelly Kramer: I agree.

Niraj Gopal: But without violating any policies.

Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I agree. I think that’s super important.

So let’s talk about end to end encryption and how that safeguards meetings. I don’t think a lot of people really understand the role that E2E plays. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Niraj Gopal: Yeah, absolutely. End to end encryption really addresses one of the major trends that I mentioned regarding the private and confidential meetings. So a lot of your conversations, like I mentioned, C-suite, board level meetings, which are remote, essentially, intellectual property and a whole bunch of other conversations. You want it to be fully private, safe, in such a way that even the provider, Cisco as a provider or any other collaboration vendor that you’re using, they don’t have access to that conversation. Because it is super secret and critical to you.

So end to end encryption provides that capability. So what happens in that case is the host, when it joined, they are the one which created a key, which would be used by all the participants for that meeting. And even Cisco, as a provider, would not have access to the key.

Shelly Kramer: Oh, wow.

Niraj Gopal: They put all the bits, the streams, the media would come through our cloud, but it is all encrypted and nobody has any sort of clue what’s going on in there. And Cisco cannot even break into and see into that. So that provider really full confidentiality for sensitive conversations. And we’ve been doing that for 10 plus years, Shelly, we have really perfected it. So it provides full controls down to the individual meeting. So within your company, you can enable it for everybody, or you can enable it for select employees, for example, C-suite. And there’s no additional charge for that, so you want to roll it out to everybody, you could.

And down to the individual meeting, for example, for this conversation, we can choose that I’m going to have an end to end conversation into an encrypted. But some other meeting, picnic planning or offsite planning or something which is not critical, I can just have as a regular meeting. So, this is very important and it scales really well. Hundreds of attendees can participate in a conversation and they don’t know anything except that this conversation is fully private.

Shelly Kramer: Yeah, I think that’s awesome. One of the things that our research for these couple of different reports showed us is that there’s an increasing gap between the top tier and the second tier vendors in this space. And the perceived level of security consciousness by enterprise professionals. Zoom continues to, regardless of how it iterates and how the messaging that Zoom uses about security and things like that. I think the company has definitely in the enterprise space, taken a hit as it relates to in the enterprise space, in the educational space, in lots and lots of areas. Because people are just concerned.

My daughter works for an enterprise insurance company and they were 100% banned from using the platform. So it’s hard to walk away from a reputational hit that’s associated with the data breach. And I think that as it relates to security, there are only really a couple of collaboration platforms who are top tier, as it relates to security and encryption and data protection and all compliance and all of those things. And Cisco WebEx is at the top of the list and that’s one of the reasons we’re having this conversation.

One of the things I wanted to talk about, I wanted to move away from just the workplace in general and touched briefly on the healthcare space. And more and more people are using tele-health to deliver, more and more companies are using telehealth to deliver and take care of patients, and more and more people are availing themselves of this. So when it comes to making healthcare secure, talk with us a little bit about what you and your team at WebEx are doing to facilitate this.

Niraj Gopal: So, Shelly, all of the capabilities that I mentioned, making the platform secure, these are foundational applied to every vertical. But healthcare is especially special, it’s very regulated as you know.

Shelly Kramer: Right.

Niraj Gopal: Patient health information, the private information shouldn’t be shared with anybody outside. We are obviously HIPAA compliant, we sign BAM, all the good stuff. But where we really shine is like two places. One is, there is a third party audit, HIPAA today is really self-audited, essentially. There is no third party auditing it.

Shelly Kramer: Right.

Niraj Gopal: But we have a certification called HITRUST, it is one of the most regular certifications. It took us two years and hundreds of person months to get this certification. But it’s certifies WebEx teams as a platform, certified for use of patient health information. No other collaboration vendor in the industry has that certification, so you have an exposure over there if you go with somebody else. Where as we are fully certified, we can share the reports with the customer. So a lot of confidence you get with that.

And the second thing that we have is an add-on in terms of the DLP capabilities. So we have advanced API and we have extended that DLP capability to meetings as well. We work obviously with open partners ecosystem, we work with essentially all the leading CASB DLP provider compliance tools that you have. But we also have a built-in Cisco DLP packaged as part of WebEx. What that does is it has built-in healthcare related policies. You just go to that tool, enable that, and your use of WebEx teams, of WebEx teams as a platform, or WebEx as a platform is obviously high-trust and HIPAA certified. But what you type in it is also going to be HIPAA certified because of that add-on that we have within the tool. And that is really unique because there’s no other collaboration right around there with their own DLP CASB capabilities.

Shelly Kramer: Well, that’s awesome. That makes me feel a lot better when I’m communicating with my doctors in telehealth visits. And there’s no sign that that’s slowing down anytime soon.

I’d love to wrap up our conversation and just talk a little bit about what’s next. What do you think is next on the roadmap for collaboration security? What do you see that’s ahead? What are you working on that you can talk about, that’s interesting? What do you think people, customers in the enterprise care the most about? Lay it on me.

Niraj Gopal: Yeah, indeed, yeah. We’re investing a lot in security compliance and this capabilities. So this month we have something called space classification capability. It is a start of a data classification capabilities that we are going to be building in the platform. So starting now you can tag your conversations as secret, or you can tag them as public, or confidential, depending upon your organizations data tier levels, essentially. Fully customizable. And then based on that, your employees are aware as to what they should be sharing with that conversation because there’ll be prompted every time that this is a secret conversation, don’t bring in outside users, so on and so forth. And it would integrate with third party tools, the CASB tools, so they could enforce differentiated policies. Secret, if somebody tries to even add a third party, external user, they will be ejected as an example. And they can only share the right type of conversation.
Ethical walls is another capability, which is very important in financial vertical. All the banks, creators cannot talk to, as an example, the research staff-

Shelly Kramer: Right.

Niraj Gopal: Because of conflict of interest and FINRA and other regulation. So that capability is native and built into control hub, is going to be out pretty soon, essentially. Legal vertical also benefits from that.

Meeting’s DLP capabilities, which I’ve briefly talked about, they are going to be available now. Which means any conversation that we are recording, we are going to look at the transcription of that, what was mentioned and spoken in that meeting. And the third party tools will apply policies on that. If, for example, I share some social security number, whereas my policy is not to share that, it will be flagged. And I’ll tell you at minute eight, Niraj’s violated this policy. So which is unique in the industry, nobody does that and we are releasing it as we speak, essentially.

And there are several other capabilities we’re going to be, obviously, working with our security business unit, getting more additional capabilities, driving the best of Cisco and Cisco enabling more personal device, securing the personal device even if it doesn’t have any corporate managed end point on that. So a lot of exciting capabilities.

Shelly Kramer: Yeah, that is really exciting. And I do love that … I mean, I love the prompts that tell you when something is wrong or alert you to, “Hey, dummy, you can’t do that.” Or whatever. That’s lay person speak. No, I think that’s really cool and that’s really exciting look ahead.

So Niraj, this has just been so interesting, thank you so much for hanging out with me. What I want to remind our listeners that in the show notes for this episode, I will include links to each one of these research papers, Unified Communications and Collaboration, the essential differentiators for 2020 and beyond. Which is information that I think you’ll want to take a look at as you’re evaluating your collaboration platforms. And secondly, Unified Communications and Collaboration, and a deep look at the primacy of security, privacy, and trust. And really, I think that you’ll agree that if you make time to download and read this, you’ll see there’s some really eye opening data in there about what’s happening across this landscape and the role that privacy and security and trust and compliance and all those things are playing. So, we set out to create some really valuable resources for you and I think you’ll agree if you get a chance to download those.

So thank you very much for spending time with me today. I always appreciate hearing from really smart people and you definitely are one of those. And we’ll talk again soon.

Niraj Gopal: Absolutely. Thank you, Shelly, it was nice talking to you.

 

Author Information

Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”

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