Staying On Key: BluStor’s Smart Card Platform Protects the Full Stream of Mobile Security
15 Oct 2013 Kim Borg, Mobile Security by Editor by Kim Borg
When it comes to grasping the key to security, next-generation smart card platform provider, BluStor, appears to have it all locked up.
The brainchild of Finis Conner, co-founder of Seagate and founder of Conner Peripherals, BluStor proffers a platform that packs a punch – and a flash, natch – with high-capacity storage in the ever-pervasive smart card form factor.
Appreciating the overwhelming need for effective mobile identity authentication, Conner proceeded to create a platform with a unique value proposition – one that offers the full stream of mobile security: device, user and data. BluStor has managed an enviable maneuver: that is, taking the burden off of the user by leveraging not only biometric authentication (think fingerprints and iris scans) but also gigabyte-generous storage in a Bluetooth-enabled smart card form factor.
With national ID, health care, BYOD, and other mobile application needs reaching a feverish pitch, perhaps Conner’s platform can exorcise so many of the fraudulent, phishing demons haunting the mobile world today.
I had the pleasure recently of speaking with Conner (who’s a mere mortal like the rest of us, I was delighted to discover) about how he’s turning on its head a mobile security market that already exists and perhaps more importantly, what exists within the realm of possibility, as only a visionary can convey.
Kim Borg: The BluStor mobile computing security platform purports to protect the full stream of mobile security – device, user and data – in a way that is virtually transparent to the user. How has BluStor achieved this?
Finis Conner: As we know historically, the mobile world has been evolving. This evolving market of mobile computing – not from the standpoint of software and solution but from the standpoint of platforms, where we move from 5.25-inch hard drives to 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch, all of that was done primarily to evolve the scale of portability of computing.
It’s kind of like a bridge to mobility and I’ve been on that bridge a long time.
Several years ago, around 2007, when Apple came out with the iPhone, all of a sudden you start seeing things that could be done in the mobile world that previously had been done only on the desktop or the laptop. Of course, the laptop market was widely used and widely accepted but one of the big problems of laptops in the mobile world was that it was the highest x component out there. The big problem was that the devices themselves were not really protecting the content that was downloaded onto them or protecting the identity of individuals.
The release of the first generation iPhone opened up a huge market opportunity for doing the same things on an iPhone that you were previously doing on a laptop, with a caveat: The solution for security was not really brought along in a timely manner to prevent the identity theft and fraud.
The technology evolution, which created these wonderful opportunities, has also created a huge liability in protecting things such as mobile transactions, data and corporate assets. So, as you look at the progression of the mobile devices, from multiple kinds of smart phone to tablets, the proliferation in the number of units is huge but the security component that should have accompanied it was not sufficient.
www.blustor.co
