For Vishal Gupta, an early start is like winning half the battle! And so it happened that even while he was busy preparing for his final examinations at IIT, Bombay, this electrical engineering graduate created something that proved to be the proverbial first stone in his first enterprise.

Vishal’s final year thesis on fingerprint imaging led to the development of the core technology behind Herald Logic, a company that he founded and ran. It was primarily an awareness of the need for information security outside of the enterprise that drove the company to look at areas in security and data protection.

Till date, most security technologies continue to focus on protecting information while it is within a perimeter. On the other side is the problem in the environment of connectivity within enterprise value chains that relates to keeping data within the enterprise without seepage. It travels to vendors, partners & customers in different forms. And this forms a significant source of information leakage for enterprises.

Herald Logic was started from within the IIT Bombay incubator while Vishal was completing his final year project in fingerprint imaging. The underlying algorithms that were developed during this project were reused in the company’s first product called IntelliPush.

And then came Seclore Technologies, which was again incubated from within IIT Bombay in 2004 and in this case it was the awareness of an industry need related to security outside of the enterprise that drove its formation. Its vision for the future is to establish ownership of all information in the world and give complete control of the information to the owner. Seclore has aggressive plans both geographically (in Asia to start with) as well as in terms of offerings. “The state of awareness of the problem, the potential impact as well as the solutions in the area of information security is abysmally low,” says Gupta.

He says there are many reasons for such a scenario in India, the primary one being the lack of disclosure norms i.e. in case there is information leakage no law can force the enterprise to inform the affected parties about the loss. “This is not the case with most developed nations where disclosure norms for information security breaches are very strict,” he says.

Since, information security initiatives are mostly driven by incidents and regulatory compliance more than a proactive investment in security, the company has a clear vision on what it aims to achieve in the enterprise space

“We hope to enable them to outsource more and more processes by setting up a mechanism to retain control of the information shared during the outsourcing processThis is going to force enterprises to relook at the portfolio of processes that they are willing to outsource,” says Gupta

For outsourcing service providers, Seclore intends to reduce liability, legal costs as well as audit related costs in on-boarding and servicing clientsThe company’s investments today are equally split between increasing the reach of its sales and implementation channel and therefore its products and creating the intellectual property for clients to easily adopt, use and audit Seclore’s technology,

For a man who believes that his biggest strength is perseverance and objectivity, Vishal’s dream is to make a change in the way people produce environmental waste To him, this is a matter that the world needs to take seriously.

An avid reader of books, Vishal says he his recent favourites include Shantaram and Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. His favourite gadget is a toy helicopter that flies and a must-have for him through the year is “quality time with his son”. His favourite holiday spots are Croatia and Ladakh while the only thing he cannot forgive is indecisiveness.