People have always needed to protect sensitive information - but as more data has been digitised, the way we share it has changed.
We founded Egress to reflect this change. Building from our experience running a company that specialised in securing data shared via USB and removable media, we recognised that email would rapidly become the go-to tool for sending and recieving sensitive information.
Find out more about our motivations behind starting Egress in my short video.
Transcript:
The idea for Egress came about - I guess it was a logical evolution of the previous business.
The previous business focused on endpoint security. I don't know if anyone remembers maybe 10 or 15 years ago people used to walk around with thumb drives and memory sticks, and the fear was don't lose your data on the subway, or people could walk into the business and plug memory sticks into your PC and take data out, and that was a real genuine concern. I remember I'd go to MoD sites and see people putting glue in USB ports, I mean some pretty basic ways to solve the problem. Of course, at the time we had a technological way to solve the problem.
But that was 15 years ago, and the world just moved on and evolved - the way we carry data, and the way we share data, and it was less about removable media and more about transferring files digitally. Email's a logical way of doing that but there are other ways of sharing files, and I think what happened in that time, there was a real step-change in infrastructure. It doesn't feel that long ago to me that my phone was a phone and it wasn't access to the Internet and access to my email, and in my relatively short career, the devices that we use every day have just transformed how we operate.
In that same period, infrastructure worldwide upgraded and it presented itself the opportunity to kind of achieve more things. For us, we saw that opportunity as a way people would share information digitally, move away from this kind of legacy walking around with devices, to a more file-sharing philosophy. And maybe you build upon what we've always done on email, but you operate in different ways.
The core idea was based around if we want to share our information digitally, then how can we offer customers a way to do that easily (because there wasn't an easy way to do it), do it securely (and again there wasn't many ways of doing that), but also give customers a way to be able to stay in control of their data even after it left the network perimeter, their boundaries, because none of those things existed. Every way that customers would share information was either easy and not secure, or it was secure and it was definitely not easy, so we wanted to disrupt that. I just felt it was really good timing so we spent a number of years building on that and testing it with with potential customers in the space to bring to market a capability that would allow businesses to share information easily without friction in a secure way.