IT Week: What is the gap in the market that Star Technology Services is hoping to fill?
White: Not many companies are dealing with both the internet and communications. We’re trying to deal with both because they will merge eventually. Five years from today, it is inconceivable that firms will not be buying their data, mobile and fixed-line services from the same provider.

What are the security implications of this trend?
The emerging communications paradigms have the potential to be massively economically enhancing ­ all studies of businesses that have broadband show they have become more efficient ­ but security always lags behind. We thought the virus problem had gone away, and it has because it’s now all about worms and Trojans, which are much more serious. Attacks are more targeted and everything is getting more sinister. It’s pretty easy for me to get all your Excel spreadsheets and PDFs off your PC, if I wanted to.

How do the needs of enterprises and smaller businesses differ?
The key difference is that enterprises have the resources to do due diligence on [security vendors] so they know how and what to pick, whereas small firms don’t, so they get bits and pieces, which is ineffective.

How will internet security change?
In the past, you would have a firewall to stop the bad stuff, then you would have someone looking for the signatures. But looking for known threats is no longer good enough. We must be more proactive: having technology woven into the fabric of the internet looking at reputation and monitoring where traffic is going from and to. Cisco is now heading in this direction after its acquisition of IronPort and its work on creating a self-defending network.

Will there be changes to user authentication?
Secure log-on will be big ­ currently, access to confidential information anywhere in the world is managed with passwords and saved in cookies, so there will be growth in managed authentication. The trouble is in having so many tags and [one-time password-generating] tokens, so managed services organisations could co-ordinate and integrate these.

Has on-demand software now been accepted by the mainstream?
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a reality now. Many solutions over the next four or five years will be aimed at smaller firms, but SaaS will play a part in the enterprise space too. Much of Salesforce.com’s success has come from divisions of enterprises saying, “I’m not waiting for that SAP or Oracle implementation; I want to buy something that works now”.