Covata: ASX Spotlight Series March 2016, New York

Interviews

by Carolyn Herbert

Covata Limited (ASX:CVT) Vice President, Nichola Parker discusses the company’s focus and market opportunities at the ASX Spotlight Series 2016, New York
 
Covata Limited (ASX:CVT) is a data security company. We’ve got a patented approach to how we protect data as it travels over the Internet. Essentially, the way we’ve been protecting information is broken. We’ve been applying a firewall approach, alerts and alarms. They’re all trying to bed down the way that we share information across the Internet.
 
Unfortunately the Internet is a wonderful sharing protocol; it’s designed to have information freely move across the Internet. So we needed a lightweight, scalable, easy solution to protect blobs of information. So at Covata eight years ago,
 combined encryption with identity, with policy, to ensure that we had a holistic approach to securing individual pieces of data, no matter where they travel.
 
The data security and the security market is huge. Recently we’ve seen the names of Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT), JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM-J), The IRS (Internal Revenue Service), all these huge institutions are being hacked and we don’t see that going away anytime soon. The issue of data security has now gone to the C-level. You’ve got CEOs and Chairmen demanding from their chief information security officers that they’re able to find a solution, to how they secure their data.
 
So Covata has a patented platform and that’s that holy triangle that I mentioned before. But we also have a secure file sharing application. EFSS (Enterprise File Sync-and-Share) and the way we’re able to easily share information, it became a consumer market, because businesses needed to collaborate and be able to share information. However, you’re not seeing the enterprise customers or the government departments and agencies, moving their valuable data to a consumer EFSS product in the Cloud. Why, because security is a key risk.
 
So Covata’s product Safe Share, ensures that the really stringent security conscious and highly regulated enterprise customers, such as financial institutions, insurers, government departments and agencies, of which we have 15 in the Australian Government using Safe Share, to share information. So whilst the EFSS consumer market might seem saturated, there aren’t many products that have the DNA of security baked into its core.
 
I think the biggest area of opportunity is actually in the IoE (Internet of Everything) and IoT (Internet of Things) space. What we’re starting to see is that there is going to be, there’s predictions of 10 billion to 20 billion devices connected to the Internet, by 2020. What that means is each individual device is going to be creating and sharing billions of pieces of information. Some of it might seem innocuous and we think to ourselves, why do we need to protect it. But as we go into the industrial world of IoE and IoT, security becomes paramount.
 
If you’re protecting information on your Smart Farm, or in fact on a remote mine and somebody’s able to hack that information, they could even spoof the infrastructure and cause a cyber terrorist attack. Or they could actually steal that valuable information and pricing negotiations, when you take that yield into another country, can become very difficult to have. So the security issue of IoT and IoE I think is the real opportunity ahead.
 
Covata runs two distinct businesses with our Safe Share product and also our platform. Safe Share that we sell into telcos and government around the world, we anticipate that we’ll sign two new major telcos in Latin America and also in Asia. We’ll also see significant runs in our government progress, particularly out of the UK Government. From the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) side of things with our patented platform, we’re partnered with Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) in a 10-year deal. And we anticipate that this year, we’re going to see real growth in our Cloud and IoE and IoT strategy.
 
Ends

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