Interview With Johannes Wiklund – Jotform

Aviva Zacks Aviva Zacks

Aviva Zacks of Safety Detectives recently interviewed Johannes Wiklund, Head of Information Security at Jotform. She asked him about how his company handles security.

Safety Detectives: Can you tell me about your company’s services?

Johannes Wiklund: Our company, Jotform, is a powerful online forms solution, and we make it easy for non-technical users to create forms to collect all kinds of data. I’ve been here just under one year, but one thing that stands out about Jotform is the full suite of integrations we offer. Specifically, I want to mention payment integrations with PayPal and many payment gateways.

It’s a good selling point for either individuals or groups who are organizing events and need to accept a payment. For example, a school’s parent-teacher association may want to use Jotform to collect money and information about their parents, but that’s just the entry point. 

We have a lot of other benefits, such as 10,000 templates that users can choose from, workflows with conditional logic, and integrations with CRM systems and other third-party services that will essentially help automate workflows. People turn to Jotform to take something that used to be a paper-based process and turn it into a simple digital process. 

SD: You mentioned schools as a customer. Who else is in your customer base? 

JW: Our top five industries are nonprofit, healthcare, education, e-commerce, and finance. I want to point out how popular Jotform has become in healthcare. And in that field, our customers range from small doctor’s offices all the way up to major regional hospitals. 

SD: What makes your product and company unique? 

JW: From a product perspective, I believe the breadth of our product offering is one of the key competitive advantages. We’re constantly innovating. We’re launching new features to make the product even better. I would say our product is on the leading edge of the form builder ecosystem. 

What makes the company unique is that it’s a bootstrapped startup––our CEO never took any outside funding. It’s been a very product-first and customer-centric journey. Essentially, he built a product and got some initial customers. That allowed him to hire more people to enhance the product, which led to more customers. It really just grew organically. 

We’re also a fast-growing company. About a year ago, we celebrated 10 million global users. And guess what? Now we’re already over 16 million. 

SD: Can you tell me how your company handles its customers’ security?

JW: Jotform takes the security and privacy of our users very seriously. This starts with having solid internal processes. Part of my job here at Jotform is to ensure that security becomes part of everybody’s mission. We do that by providing in-depth security awareness training to all our employees and reminding them through various email campaigns how they can help keep Jotform safe. 

We also have a strong application security team. We perform code reviews of all the new features and updates that we provide to the customers. In addition, we have sophisticated monitoring that allows us to detect any possible issues before they become a problem. 

Many of those security features we offer our customers are built directly into the product. So, for example, if you’re operating in the EU or trying to collect data from EU citizens, you can elect to have all your Jotform data in one of our EU data centers, keeping it GDPR compliant. 

Healthcare-wise, we have a HIPAA-compliant Jotform product in the US. So, if you’re a healthcare provider trying to gather private health information, you can upgrade to that product, including full disk encryption of all your data. There’s also a simple way to learn more about our security features at Jotform.com/security.

SD: Do you feel that the pandemic has affected your industry?

JW: I think the pandemic has affected our industry in some interesting ways. With everyone working from home, folks had to digitize solutions that used to be paper-based. I mentioned healthcare earlier, and that’s one of our biggest industries that has grown during COVID. 

For example, medical practices now are doing COVID-related screenings, liability forms, and vaccination forms on Jotform. They’re able to offer telemedicine without someone having to be there physically.

COVID pushed a lot of companies to digitize paper forms, and Jotform contributed to the digital transformation of these businesses.

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.