For all the policy focus put on sovereign capability in areas like cloud services or security, the systems that governments and large enterprises actually rely on barely rate a mention.
The communications function in large organisations has splintered with each new generation of technology. Most employees have messages spread across multiple platforms, messaging apps and collaboration tools.
And that’s without mentioning that the communications workhorse – email – is a platform designed in the 1980s and barely modified since.
Sara Goldsworthy is a former senior public servant operating in the national security space who most recently spent several years at AWS, before founding Corro, a highly-secure communications platform built for the ‘most sensitive’ environments.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, Ms Goldsworthy opens the door to the Corro platform, which brings all of the disparate enterprise communications together into a secure ‘single-pane’ view of messages.
“Communications is just so fundamentally important to [all of] us. It is that strategic capability [that is] the connective tissue between us as humans. It is how we create shared understanding [at work] and navigate complexity together,” Ms Goldsworthy said.
“And yet the systems that we rely on are outdated. Email was designed in the 80s. They’re fragmented. Things are spread across all different platforms, some of which we’ve lost control over.”
The problem is not that nobody recognises it, but rather that everyone has learned to live with it, she says
“Every time I talk to someone, they’re like, ‘Yes, I spent ages today looking for an email, I know it was there [but] I couldn’t find it.’ That resonates, but we all still accept it,” she said. “It’s time for us to really not accept that.”
Part of the reason the status quo has survived is that a trusted replacement is hard to build. “It is actually hard to build what we’re building, and that’s why some others have sort of tried [and] not quite got there,” she said.
To make the case, Corro runs a research program alongside product development, led by Dr Alan Davison, the former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney. The program is designed to quantify the cost of fragmented communications and feed what it learns back into the product.
Corro is building for anyone who uses email or messaging for work, but its focus is on high-stakes, complex communications environments. That’s government, critical infrastructure, professional services and large enterprise.
Government is the current priority customer, and Ms Goldsworthy is pitching collaboration rather than a finished product.
“We’re certainly in conversations, and we’re looking at how we can work alongside [government] in a co-design capacity to build something that is genuinely fit for purpose,” she said.
Her own career makes her an unusual broker between the two worlds. She found Canva “chalk and cheese” compared with the public service, but AWS was another matter.
“Working in one of those big hyperscalers is not at all dissimilar to being in a government bureaucracy,” she said, adding that many inside AWS would not see it that way. “I found a lot of people when I joined AWS were like, ‘How are you finding this change? It must be so different.’ And to me, that was surprising.”
On sovereignty, Ms Goldsworthy prefers to talk about control and choice and is wary of a rhetoric that pushes countries apart.
“We believe that we need choice and that we are overly reliant on technology from a small number of jurisdictions,” she said. “[But] I don’t want to live in a world where we’re isolated from each other, a bifurcated world.”
Corro has been in conversations with governments and large enterprises in Singapore, the UK, Europe and the US, and has worked with Chatham House on what tomorrow’s infrastructure looks like from a middle-power perspective.
On the morning of the interview, she had met a European government representative who had specifically sought out Corro in part because of its Australia and New Zealand heritage.
“Having come out of government and thought very deeply about national security and the national interest for a long time, I hadn’t appreciated early on in the Corro journey just how significant the fact that we were building this out of Australia and New Zealand would be,” she said
“It has just become more and more pertinent.”
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.