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> Continued from Page 32manager, but I have the ability to synthesize lots of information and data and to figure out how to steer the company, based on it.Q: Some people have security issues with the cloud. Should they? Is the cloud safe?A: Like everything else, it depends. When we started the business years ago larger companies wouldn’t let us touch their data, wouldn’t let it leave their firewall. In the last 12 years you’ve seen more and more of them getting more comfortable with the idea of the cloud.The reality is that most providers in our industry probably have better security than the companies themselves.Our security measures, our peers’ security measures are the synthesis of hundreds and thousands of companies’ minimum security requirements.When they do audits on us, they impose standards we have to uphold. It becomes a very secure environment. And we probably do a better job than most of the companies can do themselves.Even a public cloud, like Amazon, I’m sure you’ll have risks that you’ll have to consider, but I don’t think it’s as risky as people maybe portray it to be. It’s more of a fear of the unknown, a perception that it’s risky, that influences people not to use the cloud.But it really depends on who you’re talking about. If you go to an unknown service provider, if you don’t know where your data’s going, how it’s controlled, the cloud can be very dangerous. I don’t think the cloud is risky or not risky. It depends.Q: What about financial regulations? There are a boatload of new regulations and more coming, and not just in the U.S. and not just in this hemisphere. How do you deal with that? What are the biggest compliance issues?A: The volume of regulations is overwhelming. If we look at just those that Smarsh cares about, or is affected by, it can be overwhelming. If you’re a large global financial services firm, the challenges are pretty huge.We stay on top of the ones that matter to our business, to our products. So it’s record keeping requirements, advertising, social media — things of that nature.We have a team of people internally that keeps an eye on them. We also have partnerships with dozens of regulatory consultants who help us.And I think the changes in those regulations that affect our products find their way into the products before customers realize they need to address them.Because we have such a broad customer base, usually we’ll have one or two clients who will say, “Hey, we have to address a certain section of this new regulation. Can you help us out?” So we hear about it very, very early on.We’re positioned to hear what’s coming, to address it quickly and to roll those benefits out to the entire customer base.Where it gets a little bit challenging, though, is that you have in some cases regulations that conflict with one another. You may have a requirement to monitor your employees in one country, but another country might prohibit that.With social media there was a little bit of concern that in financial services you had to monitor social media posts of your employees. For a while some of the states were actually saying they were going to prohibit employers from requesting user names or passwords as a condition of employment.And what has happened is that most people in financial services have realized that the states are making exceptions and carve-outs for industries that are regulated, like financial services. But for a while there were a lot of companies that were hesitant to monitor their employees’ social media or to allow their employees to use social media because they couldn’t monitor it, because there was this idea that it might be prohibited by the state.Q: You’ve been doing this basically since the start of the millennium. Are you going to keep doing it? What’s next for you? Do you have an ambition beyond this company?33A: There’s a lot on our company’s to-do list. We’ve got lots of new content types that we want to address, we’ve got new supervision tools that we want to introduce, and we’ve got integrations with partners that will keep us busy for years to come. So there’s plenty to do. And the technology is probably more fascinating than it might seem on the surface.We have really, really large data sets, we have analytics, we have software development service functions. For a technology employee, this is a pretty exciting place to be.I’m still very interested in everything we’re doing. I like solving business problems, I like solving tech problems, and I don’t think I could sit still. If I stopped working at Smarsh, if I ever moved on, I would probably start another company. ★AWARDS SUPPLEMENT 2014 | FTF NEWS MAGAZINE