Yubico has announced that Wendy Spies will be taking over as the company’s SVP of New Business. Spies arrives after a stint at Microsoft, where she led business development for new cloud and AI products. Her role at Yubico will be similar, with an early emphasis on YubiHSM.

To that end, Spies will leverage more than 20 years of experience in the tech industry; and in a blog post announcing her appointment, she described YubiHSM as “a natural extension of our YubiKey product line for devices and data.”

“YubiHSM provides protection for your keys in hardware that is physically isolated from operations on the server, creating yet another layer of security,” said Spies. “This layer of security, combined with a simple, small attack surface form factor, can make it easier to adopt this technology without breaking the bank.”

Yubico is a longtime advocate of password-free security. The company recently released an iOS security key with Lightning functionality, and has also celebrated the ongoing success of FIDO2 initiatives. Spies hopes to further those objectives in her capacity as the SVP of New Business. 

“I look forward to the passwordless future we are building,” she said. “I look forward to no longer hearing stories about good folks getting their accounts hacked because passwords stink, and because hackers continue to have more resources than we do.”