John W. Thompson
John W. Thompson
John Wendell Thompson is an American businessman and is the CEO of privately held Virtual Instruments and the chairman of Microsoft. He is a former vice-president at IBM and the former chief executive officerof Symantec. Thompson later became an independent director on the board of Microsoft, and on February 4, 2014, he was named the chairman of the board. He led the search for Microsoft's next CEO; as a result, Satya Nadella was selected...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth24 April 1949
CountryUnited States of America
What the Snowden scenario proved is that the weakest link is not the technology, the weakest link is the individual; we shouldn't kid ourselves.
Right now we have a closure rate between discovery and exploitation of four to six months. We need to be more in the realm of seven to 10 days. That is an enormous challenge.
I'm an intensely competitive guy who is driven by the idea that accepting mediocrity or accepting defeat is not the way you succeed in life.
I grew up in West Palm Beach, Florida. My dad took me hunting, trapping and fishing when I was a kid.
The U.S. and Israel probably lead the way in terms of venture investment in technologies companies focused on the security paradigm. That is quite encouraging.
So ensuring the integrity of the data and integrity and validity of the connection is a very important element in any company's strategy that is moving towards a Web service paradigm.
Second issue is the rapidly accelerating increase in the number of vulnerabilities that get discovered every day. And, equally importantly, is the shortening of time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the release of an exploit.
If you accept that security is a process, and if you can eliminate the human interaction or intervention in that process by automating more, that is a good thing.
First, our focus on security is on the infrastructure itself. So it is all about how you protect the network, the device, and the application that is riding on the server.
What we are seeing now is customers shifting their attention from security products like firewalls and intrusion sensors, to the policies that need to be in place, and the technologies that help them enforce policy compliance.
But what Web services suggest is that the connection is always there between an application that is resident somewhere in the cloud, and a user who is somewhere on the other end of a connection.
We need to shift the paradigm from reactive technologies to more integrative solutions that deal with the variety and complexity of the threats that are out there today.
One of the things that has been truly incredible to observe though, is the amount of venture investment that has gone into early stage security technology.
We know what they're going through. We sympathize with them. We're still Southerners and we're still pulling together. It's all sweet tea and casseroles.