The problems are new, but Pondurance isn’t. As Chief Executive Officer Doug Howard says, the company isn’t a “fly-by-night” entry into the cybersecurity space. Founded in 2008, Pondurance has been around since before Generative AI was a twinkle in the eye for most anyone but science fiction writers.
Since then, technology has come a long way, but so has Howard, a small-town guy whose military experience shaped his worldview – and taught him to stay cool under pressure. He joined the U.S. Air Force, not with hopes of flying (“no depth perception”) but aspiring to get into the technology and communications aspects of defense. He scored high enough on his entry exams to be sent to Hawaii, but later transferred to the Pentagon.
It was there that he learned to have nerves of steel. When the Department of Defense lost a satellite, Howard was manning its controls (“not my fault!”) when Colin Powell, then a three-star general, laid a hand on his shoulder and told him people around the world were dying because they could no longer communicate with the Pentagon. As Howard recalled – just as in the parentheticals above – it was a transformative moment, one that “set the context for the rest of my life.”
Fast-forward to today, and it’s clear that the sense of urgency engendered by Howard’s military experience hasn’t ebbed in the least. Under his leadership, Pondurance uses AI and automation technology not as a definitive solution for cybersecurity, but as a starting point. As the company’s website states, “you need ingenious human experience because attackers aren’t machines, they’re people.”
At the head of his own ingenious team sits Howard, keeping tabs on the worldwide cataclysms that shape global security trends on all fronts, some of which “are going to cause incremental disruption over the next four years that will create opportunity, potentially, for hackers to thrive.” Add that to what Howard calls the “overall hacking community” and the ascendance of AI technology in the wrong hands, and it’s no wonder that Pondurance has its hands full. The good news is they’re on our shoulders, not telling us how bad things are, but telling us, together, we can be alright.