By LAURA LOREK, Publisher of Silicon Hills News
Most companies wouldn’t let everyone have access to a vault of money, but many companies don’t think about limiting access to data within their organizations
That’s where ALTR comes in. It breaks up data and stores it using blockchain technology, making it inaccessible to an intruder or someone who doesn’t have the key.
ALTR, a data security company, quietly came out of stealth mode last June and announced it had raised $15 million in venture capital.
For four years, a team of engineers worked on the software behind ALTR, said David Sikora, a software industry veteran and former executive chairman at Stratfor, a global research, and intelligence platform. He is a veteran technology executive and the CEO of ALTR.
“Blockchain is a pretty profound new development, akin to where the Internet was back in the 1994-95 timeframe and the founding team of ALTR really got a great head start,” Sikora said.
Silicon Hills News recently sat down with Sikora, to talk about ALTR’s cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.
Austin-based ALTR launched its cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology last year and has customers in the healthcare industry and financial services. It also has 18 patents that have been issued and several more pending.
Early on, the founding team behind ALTR, who came from Wall Street options trading, saw how blockchain technology could be used to differentiate the data security landscape and they started investing in protecting those innovations, Sikora said. At one point and time, ALTR had 10 percent of all the issued patents in blockchain technology in the country, he said. A lot of the patents they’ve filed relate to how ALTR is breaking up and storing data in the blockchain, Sikora said.
ALTR’s platform consists of an ALTR monitor, ALTR govern and ALTR protect. It integrates into existing computer networks and supports Microsoft, Oracle and open-source database platforms. Like a 10,000 piece puzzle, ALTR breaks data into small pieces and stores it on different servers so if hackers break into a computer system, they can only access fragments of data.
And recently ALTR partnered with San Antonio-based Sirius Computer Solutions to provide blockchain-based data security as a managed service. That partnership helps the company reach even more businesses, Sikora said.
And ALTR’s blockchain technology is being used to secure data in the healthcare field. Recently FRTYL adopted the ALTR platform to protect health records involved in fertility treatment and IVF.
A lot of hype and focus on Blockchain cryptocurrency has cooled considerably this year but there are more startups focused on using blockchain for healthcare, journalism, and verification purposes. Blockchain technology is becoming more mainstream, Sikora said.
ALTR is also a member of the Austin Blockchain Collective, which is comprised of more than 120 companies in Austin. But ALTR doesn’t consider itself to be a blockchain company, Sikora said. It’s a software cybersecurity company that uses the blockchain to protect data.
For more on ALTR, listen to the entire podcast below.
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