Interview With Jeroen van Meeuwen – Kolab Now

Aviva Zacks Aviva Zacks

Aviva Zacks of Safety Detective had the chance to interview Jeroen van Meeuwen, President and CTO of Kolab Now, and ask how Kolab Now protects the cloud.

SD: What has your cybersecurity journey been until now?

Jeroen van Meeuwen: I started coding in the ‘90s. I was driven by the depth of the “open source rabbit hole” and enjoyed the interaction with and the power of the community. I was given the opportunity to join Kolab and build Kolab Now, which is now part of a larger, global cybersecurity organization that is developing solutions based on open standards and open source.

SD: What does Kolab Now do for the cloud?

JVM: Kolab Now is dependent on third-party open-source projects such as Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, and therefore contributes to it. The same applies to the orchestration of compute nodes (scale up, scale down, cycle through revisions), security components and defense-in-depth, configuration management, and software-defined networking. Kolab Now users enjoy the feature set of the cloud and the security and peace of a mind of a hosted solution in Switzerland.

SD: What is your customer base?

JVM: Our customer base includes schools, lawyers, the medical profession, journalists, government organizations, families who are sharing activity and to-do lists with their children, and thousands of privacy-centric and security-minded individuals.

SD: How do you stay ahead of the competition?

JVM: We continuously contribute to and are utilizing software innovations available throughout the open-source universe and are using efficient technology such as IBM Power 9 which provides us with the best opportunity to enhance the user experience and provide better security prospects than any of our competitors. Our new add-on option, the email security gateway, provides an additional security layer which sets us further apart from the competition.

SD: What are the worst cyberthreats today?

JVM: Based on our work with customers all over the world, we can see that poor software development processes and lax privacy policies and enforcement cause the most private data of millions of users to be compromised and shared. Aside from that, we can see that organized crime and state-sponsored cyber-attack campaigns are on the rise.

SD: How will the threat landscape change since Covid-19?

JVM: Organizations are pushing working-from-home arrangements and collaboration tools are even more important. Employees and managers now expect all sorts of topics to be addressed over email, and this offers opportunities for phishing and malware distribution. At the same time, we can see the massive growth of our online tools (some of them are available via the Plesk Premium offering), server-side provided document editing for example, but also video and voice conferencing.

About the Author
Aviva Zacks
Aviva Zacks
Cybersecurity Expert and Writer

About the Author

Aviva Zacks is a content manager, writer, editor, and really good baker. When she's not working, she enjoys reading on her porch swing with a cup of decaf.