Mark Terenzoni, the recently appointed CEO of sqrrl, stepped into theCube this week to give one of his first video interviews to Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante. The executive provided some background about his company and talked about the disruptive technology that the security firm introduced to the market.

Sqrrl sells tools and services for Apache Accumulo, a security-centric value store that its founders originally developed for the NSA. The agency has been using the system for a good number of years by the time it graduated from Apache incubation in March 2012, just a few months before Sqrrl exited stealth.

Terenzoni points out that unlike other startups, Sqrrl offers technology that has been proven in the field. Accumulo managed to build up quite a reputation in the process, which is another reason the company is getting so much attention from government agencies, telecoms and financial service providers.

The CEO says that Accumulo was built from the ground up with security in mind. He explains that this unique requirement empowered the engineers who worked on the project to solve a number of challenges that rivaling products have not yet address successfully, including the latency associated with bolted-on security measures. Another major advantage of the system is that it enables applications to detect malicious input on the fly without artificially hindering the data flow.

Later in the interview, Vellante cites Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison as saying that security should be built into the database rather than the application layer. Terenzoni agrees with this assessment for several reasons: he says that building security into every application increases risk, the cost of development and the time it takes to release each app.

For the full interview, check out the video below.