Meet Tom Kidwell, Co-Founder at Digital Infrastructure Technology Company: Ecliptic Dynamics

Ecliptic Dynamics was founded in 2018, and specialises in cyber security, communications, intelligence, and security cleared project management.

The company provides highly secure, robust, isolated web access and virtual digital infrastructures to meet the demanding requirements of the Public Sector, Journalism, Investigations and Business Intelligence.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I previously worked as a freelance trainer, primarily training overseas organisations in various subjects such as cyber security, intelligence analysis, threat reporting and open-source intelligence.

One thing I came to realise, particularly when delivering open-source intelligence courses, was people would be incredibly keen to find out what they could about other organisations. However, they often did very little, to nothing to protect themselves during this activity. Rarely taking steps to isolate their riskier online activity for their core business systems.

What I began to understand was this was due to a mixture of lack of understanding of threat, but more importantly, a lack of skill to implement a solution. So this was our starting point, to design a solution which had minimal impact on the user but absorbed as much digital risk as possible from them.

We didn’t want to impact on a user, or for them to have to become significantly upskilled to be protected. A simple proposition, use this and it will protect you when online. We also wanted to avoid making things any more complicated than necessary. One thing we are very aware of is, if security (of any type) is too constrictive, people will just find a way around it rather than work with it.

So, this was the starting point for what evolved into OIS as it is today. We spent three to four months developing, then beta testing. After we managed to secure our first clients, we started Ecliptic Dynamics as a company.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

 
Ecliptic Dynamics has evolved significantly as we grew in the first few years. The reality is, as a self-funded start-up, you have to be flexible in the beginning to ensure revenue keeps flowing. Starts up with financial backers have different pressures, but they are able to focus on a single product / vision. Ecliptic Dynamics has had to be adaptable in the initial years to stand up and grow.

This isn’t a negative. We have learnt a lot about ourselves, our products, how we innovate, what is worth pursuing, and ultimately, what isn’t. This has really helped us to understand where our core strengths are and how we can maximise them.

Our products have also evolved and adapted. OIS started as a pure web isolation platform, it has now various tiers mapped to different use cases. One significant shift was bringing Maltego into the ecosystem to allow us to conduct open-source intelligence collection, and link analysis in the secure environment OIS creates.
 

What can we hope to see from Ecliptic Dynamics in the future

 
We are at the final stage of development of GuardMail. The majority of our development time has gone into creating and rolling out the encrypted email service. So in the immediate future look out for the new fully encrypted email service with UK data residency.

Looking further ahead, I want to keep innovation at the core of Ecliptic Dynamics, not just in an R&D context but in the way we work and operate. We want to continue to strive for products and people to be the best they can.