Profile: David Ting (chief technical officer, Imprivata)

21 Jan 10

How do you describe your job to average people?

Interesting question – my wife often asks me the same question. My response is typically I try to understand and develop the technologies that makes it easier for people to securely work with computer systems.

Having worked in R&D since my graduate school days I try to discern technologies that are interesting from ones that actually solve real problems.

For a new technology or approach this means I try to understand why it exists, how it works, how it would break, its economic and user benefits and then once it passes the reasonableness test, I try to extrapolate how it might complement our product.

Any technology we introduce has usually had me as its first guinea pig so it gives me first-hand knowledge of what it can and can’t do.

What do you think needs more attention from the industry?

Usability of security products is something that is most frequently neglected when I look at what we expect end-users to work with.

At Imprivata, we have focused and improved application usability but security products are still something designed by engineers mostly for other engineers.

One of the things I learned in the past working on consumer products is the amount of design/testing necessary to make the product intuitive. We have to get to the same mind set as automotive designers.

The safety systems built into a modern car are extremely complex but from the end user’s perspective, we get in, turn on the engine, click the seat belt and drive.

Everything is intuitive even though the systems are monitoring everything from loss of traction to sudden acceleration/deceleration – that is what IT security has to become.

What security threats are overblown?

I am sure every security threat can be considered overblown – the days when we worried about outside cyber attacks to the corporate network over the WAN are pretty much self-contained through a combination of packet inspections to intrusion detection systems.

Every threat, I suspect, had its ‘overblown’ stage which then it quells down as new mitigating technologies become available.

What annoys you?

I am bothered by the complexity of the systems we work with even for simple reasons. The setup and installation manuals for some products takes days and multiple phone calls before you have a prayer in seeing if the product works or not.

One of the reasons we went with an appliance approach at Imprivata harkens back to the amount of time I’ve spent “building up” a server to even evaluate some software.

This do-it-yourself approach is neither rewarding or productive. Having watched computers and software evolve from the days when we used discrete components, punched tape and 32Kbyte systems to quad core processors with GB of memory I think it is about time we used the extra computing power to make systems easier and more intuitive.

Of what are you most proud?

Being a nerdy engineer, I get my jollies from building anything that is a tool – i.e. can help people do something better.

When customers tell me how our systems have changed the way we work and made it more pleasant or productive – that is what I am proud of.

The fact that we’ve successfully translated a vision of security made simple and private into a successful company –that is something else we as a company are proud of.

What would you use a magic IT security wand for?

Have a way to trace back to people responsible for virus, spyware and cyber attacks so we can retaliate – and world peace.

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