Prashant Shah
Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Prashant Shah has been instrumental in many investments including Baynote, Bridgestream, Cenzic, InMage, Jareva Technologies, Krillion, Scalent, SyncVoice, Tizor and Voltage Security. He also observes a number of these boards. In addition, Prashant is an active Charter Member of TiE Silicon Valley, where he is Chair of the Software SIG.
Security is contagious. Every new technology or development platform that is produced will see security have a grasp around it. And this is the biggest challenge in the security space today.

Today enterprise security is moving towards the edge and acquiring a strategic fashion. Earlier on, it focused on proving protection just to the core-centralized assets. Now the software is slowly transforming from a very centralized, mainframe-type to a more distributed architecture. Currently, the area (security) is finding new uses as similar security threats are shifting base from desktops to blackberrys and PDAs. This essentially has opened the market for security that is more ‘enter-fabric’ or inbuilt into the way computing is developed. It has to go beyond just anti-virus facility for desktop and other intrusion detection for servers.

The areas in enterprise security witnessing unprecedented growth are the wireless and compliances sectors. While on one hand, wireless remains the same with familiar set of processes, mindset, the addiction to this morphine has become quite a challenge. Wireless makes things around very easy, end users love it and it makes mobility truly available. From that perspective, there has been an early rush to get wireless without much being looked at all the elements required to get the enterprise secured. The thing about this field is that due to its constant demand, we never look at it as huge potential for security.
There are things still being mulled over in security compliance needs. While it has stepped up to the forefront with CIOs and CFOs coming out with policies, they are yet to find an optimum manner to enforce these policies.