Last week, the prestigious
Branham300 listing of the top information technology companies in Canada named York Mills-based firm SecureKey among the top 25 "up-and-coming" ICT firms in Canada. While the company
welcomed the news, SecureKey EVP Robert Blumenthal noted, "It's a recognition milestone, not a business milestone."
Of course, over the past year, as the online security ID tech startup has grown to 100 employees from 60, it has hit plenty of business milestones too. Most notably, SecureKey secured a
major investment from chip-manufacturing powerhouse Intel and
announced that the SecureKey configuration will be included in millions of Intel products being manufactured over the next year.
Blumenthal says the firm's technology solves the increasingly ubiquitous problem of secure online logins. For the sake of convenience, most username and password combinations are unsecure and often reused from website to website. More complicated (and secure) login procedures become too much trouble for users. The gold standard, he says, is a two-step process, "something you have and something you know," such as a bank card and PIN code combination. SecureKey's technology uses a small, portable "applet" contained in cards, USB keys or devices to create a similar authentification process.
Blumenthal says that next week SecureKey will launch the first phase of a
collaboration with the Government of Canada that will enable citizens to use banking credentials to interact securely with the government.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Robert Blumenthal, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, SecureKey