Ram Shriram, founding board member of Google, and former executive at Amazon.com joins the strong authentication innovator Yubico as investor and advisor.
“At a time when Internet passwords are being hacked at scale, the Yubico team continues to excel at protecting digital identities in a very elegant manner. To win the mass market of Internet users, great security needs to be simple. The YubiKey user experience with no client software, a simple PIN and a touch – delivers on this promise! says Ram Shriram, CEO & Founder, Sherpalo Ventures.
Cybersecurity needs are growing
Over the last few years the Internet has seen a growing wave of attacks and breaches that have highlighted the limitations of traditional authentication solutions. Weekly headlines of major password leaks, the Snowden/NSA publications and the recent Heartbleed vulnerability have significantly raised global awareness around secure Internet identity and privacy. While just usernames and passwords are not secure anymore, existing multi-factor authentication technologies, such as smart cards and one-time password hardware tokens have not yet scaled for the mass market. These solutions remain complicated to deploy and manage in addition to being expensive. Also, while smart phones and tablets have been rapidly adopted, mobile authentication software technologies have been exposed for malware, and have become a target attack for hackers into users’ accounts and enterprises.
The YubiKey offers strong authentication
The YubiKey is a strong authentication hardware solution that works instantly with computers and mobile devices for a range of Internet and enterprise applications. Enterprises can ensure that they have full control over their encryption secrets by leveraging Yubico’s trust-no-one deployment model offered as on-premise software or as a cloud service. Yubico’s vision is to enable Internet users to have secure access across unlimited services using their Yubikeys. To realize this dream, Yubico is a board member and a key contributor to the FIDO alliance, an open standards strong authentication consortium, along with leading Internet and financial services companies.
Yubico for the enterprise
With offices in Palo Alto, Stockholm and London, Yubico has built a profitable business internationally. The Yubikey, the company’s flagship product, is an innovative and disruptive multi-factor authentication solution built strong enough for the largest enterprises while remaining simple enough to use for consumers. Trusted by 7 of the top 10 Internet companies, Yubikeys have been used for protecting digital identities for over 40,000 customers in over 130 countries.
To accelerate its growth and make the YubiKeys ubiquitous, Yubico is proud to welcome Ram Shriram as an investor and advisor. Ram leads Sherpalo, his own Venture Capital firm, investing in promising new disruptive technologies. Ram continues to serve on the board of Google and has previously been an officer of Amazon.com.