Editor’s note: Two brothers co-founded ArrayShield Technologies in Chennai, India, in 2010 to provide a two-factor authentication product for secure access to corporate data. We interviewed co-founder and CEO Pavan Thatha about lessons learned thus far as a startup in the security space. This article is brought to SandHill readers in partnership with ProductNation.
SandHill.com: Please describe your product and how it provides business value for your customers.
Pavan Thatha: ArrayShield’s flagship offering is an innovative pattern-based, two-factor authentication (2FA) product for enterprises to protect against Identity theft and other hacking attacks. ArrayShield’s patent-pending technology is backed by extensive research done by my brother Rakesh, who is the co-founder and CTO of ArrayShield.
Password is one of the most outdated forms of basic security. Relying on mere password strength to grant access to an organization’s customer, business, prospect and financial data in an environment of high competition is very risky for businesses.
Our 2FA solution leverages visual patterns that users can remember and a card that can be carried in a user’s pocket. Our innovative solution ensures only authorized users are allowed to access key applications and IT resources, thus offering productivity and flexibility along with security to our customers. Our product easily integrates with most of the applications and technologies such as VPN to ensure connectivity and access along with security. And it’s affordable, easy to deploy, use and manage.
SandHill.com: How did your company originate?
Pavan Thatha: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I spent a few years early in my career getting an understanding of how the software industry operates. Once I got a good understanding of various aspects of the technology business, I decided to start. My brother Rakesh meanwhile had been spending a lot of time researching the information security space, which is his passion. He hit upon a very simple but effective idea of replacing obsolete password-based authentication with an alternative pattern-based authentication that provides a very high level of security against modern hacking attacks. We decided to take the plunge of starting up ArrayShield to commercialize his innovative 2FA idea.
SandHill.com: Please describe an aspect of your company’s business that has been frustrating and how you worked through the challenge.
Pavan Thatha: Our major challenge in the initial days was to convert the interest from prospects to get an order and get them to use our product. Being in a sensitive area of authentication and security, very few were ready to experiment with a new product.
To address this challenge, instead of building a full-feature product, we developed the product with minimal features that are highly stable and secure. We worked very closely with our initial prospects and took a consultative approach in building their confidence that our product is highly stable and secure. Once they got the confidence on our product, they implemented to a limited number of users followed by rollout to a larger user base.