SafetyDetectives spoke with Nate MacLeitch, founder and CEO of QuickBlox, about his motivation to start a company focused on digital communication, some of the security protocols they use, and what are some of the top cyberthreats in the chat industry.
What motivated you to start QuickBlox?
I saw an emerging need in the market for digital remote communication. The world we’re living in is changing so rapidly. More and more companies are depending on internal messengers or video conferencing solutions, not just to facilitate collaboration between employees but increasingly as principal channels for engaging with customers. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the parallel move to work-from-home has intensified this need for high-quality, secure online digital communication channels.
What does QuickBlox do, and what makes it unique?
QuickBlox is a cloud communication backend that allows private and group chat, peer-to-peer and multiparty audio and video calling, push notifications, file sharing, and more to be added to mobile and web apps. We also offer a ready-to-use video consultation plug-in. We are uniquely positioned because we are one of the few communication platform providers that can deploy our software within our customer’s own hosting environment.
Who is your target consumer?
Our software is used by multiple industries. Notably healthcare, HeathTech, Fintech, eCommerce, and social networking apps. We market our software to product managers within these industries who make decisions about what communication platform to use. Increasingly we are reaching out to the developer communities, who are ultimately the ones who have to build with our software development kits.
How do you meet compliance standards for financial, medical, and other industries?
As we have a high number of customers in Finance and Healthcare, we take regulatory standards very seriously. We have a highly experienced DevOps team who work closely with our customer’s compliance team to ensure the highest security protocols are followed. For our US healthcare customers, we offer a HIPAA compliant solution offered with a BAA. We also ensure our processes meet the standards of SOC2 compliance.
How do you ensure a secure end-to-end chat?
Our real-time communication features are built on an encrypted platform to prevent valuable data from being hacked. All chat data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our chat API benefits from additional security enhancements like virus scanning and intrusion detection. Furthermore, we can install our software directly into our customer’s own cloud or dedicated hosting environment and work with their InfoSec team to ensure that they retain complete control over their data.
What are some of the worst cyberthreats that threaten chats, and how can a user know they’re on a secure chat?
Unfortunately, phishing attacks and ransomware attacks remain the worst cyberthreats that threaten chats. At QuickBlox, we do all we can to prevent these threats. In the worst-case scenario, we also offer High Availability / Disaster Recovery configurations of our software deployment, which means that should the worst ever happen, we have your chat history and data backed up so that it can be restored. Users need to fully check out the security offering of a CPaaS provider –is their platform encrypted, are they SOC2 compliant, do they offer on-premise hosting ?–to be sure that they’re on a secure chat.