Dovell Bonnett, Founder & CEO of Access Smart, was interviewed by Adam Torres on Mission Matters Innovation Podcast.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify / Stitcher / RSS
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
In this interview, Dovell Bonnett talks with Mission Matters about the growing importance of efficient frontend cybersecurity and how Access Smart can help businesses achieve secure networks and data by removing their weakest link – Employee-Managed Passwords.
What mission matters to you?
Mr. Bonnett shares his inclination toward helping small businesses mitigate their risk of data theft. “The mission that matters to me is cyber security and preventing the number one threat that devastates companies and government agencies,” he says.
Of current cybersecurity trends, Dovell says, “The one weakest link that everybody likes to blame is password security. However, password authentication is not the problem, password management is the problem, and employee-managed passwords is what businesses need to fix.” He lists security, compliance, convenience, and being economical as the essential features required for proper cybersecurity implementation.
“Security and compliance are givens for any good cybersecurity solution. Making it convenient so users don’t circumvent it, and affordable so business implement right away, that’s what drives cybersecurity adoption. We take all four of those principles and leverage off of your existing technology investments that you’re already using,” he explains.
How did you get into the cybersecurity industry?
“I started from the technology side, back in the mid-’90s when I worked for National Semiconductor and we first started to talk about smartcards,” Bonnett recalls of his early days in the industry. “I learned that the smartcard is not a storage device of your personal information, but rather the security key to access all your digital information and services.”
After working for a variety of notable projects, including the U.S Olympics, Visa, and Bell Canada, he had an opportunity to work for Motorola where he created the Microsoft Blue ID badge that allowed the employee both physical access into buildings and logical access onto computer networks and applications. This, he says, gave him unquantifiable experience in the cybersecurity trade.
Watch Full Interview:
Tell us more about securing the “virtual front door.”
“In this digital age, a lot of times we don’t secure entry into the system,” Bonnett says. “Companies will invest and deploy a lot of different cybersecurity solutions behind the firewall. While important, that’s too late to start security. Cybersecurity must start when the computer is first turned on and ends when it’s turned off. The ‘Virtual Front Door’ is everything in front of the computer, firewall, applications, clouds, and websites. It’s the digital doorway you enter when you logon and login.”
Tell us more about Access Smart.
Access Smart has earned high praise for its enterprise multi-factor authentication (MFA) security solutions, led by a vision to ensure cybersecurity for small to medium-sized businesses, Bonnett explains. We have been reviewed by different security test labs and received five-out of-five cybersecurity stars.
“We’ve been in business for over 15 years now,” he notes. “I’ve always come together on the smart card side, combining more uses with a single card. The security available on these chips now is phenomenal, and with the encryption that’s used, you don’t have to worry about losing the card or somebody getting your data.”
He continues, “I also wanted to make it affordable and doable for the small companies because they’re the ones that get attacked the most. Plus, it is scalable for large businesses, government agencies, and Department of Defense.”
Of his recently launched book, Making Passwords Secure, Bonnett says the inspiration behind it was a need to answer questions from both the technical and business sides of the topic. For its part, Access Smart takes the guesswork and risk out of employee password management, offering solutions that keep businesses safe from hackers, and affordable by intelligently building greater security into or onto their existing infrastructure investments.
To learn more, visit Access Smart.
