Neil is the CEO and Founder of Vault Vision, a leading identity management platform for SaaS startups. His current vision is to rid the world of passwords, and ‘Protect All the Keys’ in cryptographic vaults, hence ‘Vault Vision’. His passion for software development with emphasis on application security and quality assurance has afforded him opportunities to apply his architectures and designs at large enterprise scales. Previously, Neil Proctor was the Vice President of Engineering and R&D at Acronis SCS where he has built the Engineering department from the ground up in order to harden and secure commercial-grade software such that it can be deployed into sensitive government and military installations, achieved the highest level of product certification: FIPS 140-2, Common Criteria, and DoDIN APL. Prior to Acronis SCS, Neil was the co-founder of Prompt Engineering, a start-up engineering consulting firm based in Arizona. Prior to Prompt Engineering, Neil worked for GoDaddy for 13 years, he is a proven leader in web development and server management. Neil created and led the company's security compliance technical committee. As Chairman of the Privacy Technical Committee he developed the framework for review and acceptance of all technical decisions that impacted the security posture of GoDaddy’s ‘crown jewel’ systems and customer data. From GoDaddy’s early days to IPO, Neil lead web application development, information security architecture, and was General Manager for the community division and Business Unit Manager for the marketing applications product suite delivering $14MM in annual revenue.
Neil holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Arizona. He currently resides in Denver, CO with his wife and dog. When he is not geeking out to anything Lord of The Rings related, he enjoys hiking, golf, photography, a good paint ball scrimmage, and indoor rock climbing.
Diving into this engaging interview, Neil, the founder of Vault Vision, guides us through his passion for cybersecurity and the distinctive approach of his startup. He highlights the importance of secure user authentication for web and mobile applications, presenting Vault Vision's flexible and user-friendly platform as a solution. Neil touches on how their technology addresses common cyber threats and provides a glimpse into Vault Vision's future strategies, a client success story, and his key insights as a startup founder. This conversation is a captivating read for anyone interested in the intersection of cybersecurity and startups.
As a kid I loved the ciphertext games where you try to decode secret messages, I still remember being blown away when I heard about decoding a message by matching the number of times cipher letters appeared to the amount of times letters appeared naturally in language. Ever since then, cybersecurity has been a passion. At GoDaddy where I worked for 13 years, I was the chairman of the privacy technical committee that reviewed and set standards for application cybersecurity for the company. We started Vault Vision to make it easy for other enterprises and startups to get the benefit of high-grade security in their user authentication methods. Phishing is still the biggest cybersecurity risk companies face today, and we want to help companies remove that risk by using our ultra-secure technology.
We solve the login problem for web and mobile applications. Vault Vision’s user authentication platform is different because of how easy it is to integrate, you can literally copy and paste and have full user logins, sign-ups, account recovery, and self-service profile portal in minutes. We also offer the most flexibility in letting the users determine how they want to register and authenticate, whether it is simple passwords, social sign-ins, or ultra-secure Fido tokens.
Don’t struggle with user authentication yourself, get a service provider like us to do the heavy lifting. Focus on your business and your customers, you’ll save money by offloading all that dev work and be safer for it.
You will lose customers or worse your customer’s accounts can be taken over! If your sign-up and the login process is broken or not seamless enough customers won’t use your service
It is so easy, I even published a video on how it can be integrated in 60 seconds! https://youtu.be/WMkdXJJ8TOY
Could you delve into how your solution enhances login security for MVPs? How do you handle common threats like password breaches, phishing, or brute force attacks?
The core behind our passwordless technology is how we make use of passkeys and FIDO authenticators (aka just about every device made now that has a Trusted Platform Module, TPM) to remove passwords from the equation. By replacing passwords with unphishable passkeys we are able to pull that risk.
And regarding brute force attacks, we gave back to the community and published a guide on how to add rate-limiting to HAProxy and even published a deep dive 1-hour engineering video on the subject.
https://github.com/vaultvision/blog-haproxy-rate-limiting
By being clever and using the latest and greatest technology out there. Passkey tech is so great because it is easy and secure by design.
We stay in touch with the security community, we are members of the FIDO Alliance and the OpenID Foundation.
Our most recent client developed a SaaS service that helps manage laboratory testing services and they needed their users to authenticate to use it. They reached out to us to see if we could help. We were able to get them up and running very quickly, and they even had a few feature requests that we were able to add to our product to make it even better and easier for them to use.
We are currently in talks with some of the NoCode app builders to develop tighter integration inside their platforms and tools. The NoCode builders tools make it so easy to create a website, and we make it easy to add advanced user and data features to make them super functional.
Keep talking to your customers! Their unmet needs and pain points are how you innovate and provide real solutions.
