To increase the security within my organization I decided to have PGP come down and give our administrators and IT manager a demonstration on all of the services that PGP provides. Since reading about it I have been very impressed with the way that PGP has integrated all of the aspects of encryption into a centrally managed solution. Many people, however, are not fully aware of the extent of PGP’s product line. Even after an online webcast the administrators within my organization just didn’t understand how the PGP solution could integrate with our services and centrally manage their Email, File Sharing, Full Disk Encryption, and Split-Managed Key Escrow capabilities for Windows and Macintosh notebooks, workstations, and servers as well as some PDAs.
PGP sent down Bob Adams and Nathan Daniels from their Dallas office. Bob is their Texas sales representative and Nathan was their technical expert. After briefly chatting with both I discovered that Nathan has worked for Network Associates, F-Secure, McAfee, and has been with PGP for about three years. Definitely an impressive background. Although I don’t remember the full extent of Bob’s background, I do know that he worked for IBM in their Internet Security Solutions department and he knows several people on their X-Force team.
“IBM ISS X-Force team? Hey, do you know David Maynor and Robert Graham?” Bob knew Robert and spoke very highly of him as well as the rest of the X-Force team. (I just noticed that the X-Force team has a blog.)
Then later, was we started talking about which companies in Texas handled the sales of their product I asked if they worked with Accuvant. Nathan responded that they have been working with them recently. “Hey, do you know Michael Farnum?” Indeed Nathan has meet Michael and, of course, spoke highly of him as well.
Now, I’m not going to tell you that any of this name dropping gained my organization any bargaining collateral. But I can say that talking to these guys about people that they had met, worked with, and liked did help in the fact that we had a little more in common than before. This made everybody a little more comfortable and the meeting went very well. I guess it is just one of the extra benefits of blogging.
Go forth and do good things,
Cutaway
PGP, blogging, encryption, Accuvant, IBM, ISS, F-Secure, X-Force, Security Ripcord, Michael Farnum, David Maynor, Robert Graham