Awareness Scales DLP Offering Via SaaS Model

Company:

Headquarters: Los Angeles, Calif.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: InterGuard Suite

Year Founded: 2002

Number of Channel Partners: 30 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: SMB-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Awareness touts its DLP security offering as the only one out there deployable in a SaaS model that scales from small businesses to sprawling enterprises.

The Lowdown: Awareness Technologies started in 2002 as a group of software developers, primarily consulting for foreign intelligence agencies that were getting serious about counterterrorism and managing internal computer security threats.

"We started evaluating the enterprise market in the U.S.," said COO Tom Bilyeu. "What are the issues these guys are going to be facing in the future? Every day the network becomes more porous, and you have remote workers, traveling salesmen, contractors, outsourcing, all these people coming and going across the network. It hasn't been an easy road to hoe, but we think we've nailed it."

The hook for Awareness' most popular products -- the Interguard data loss prevention suite, consisting of data loss browser-based management, endpoint security and Web-application infrastructure, Laptop Cop theft protection software and WebWatcherNow parental monitoring software -- is that they operate at the desktop level, instead of at the network level, using single agent desktop software and requiring no hardware.

"We never need to connect to the network, don't need the network to deploy it, don't need the network to update the info, nothing," Bilyeu said. "We've made a completely anonymous desktop agent capable of making decisions and enforcing policies right there on the desktop -- invisible and with a small footprint. We protect you from all those threats that arrive from the inside, whether accidental or intentional."

Bilyeu said Awareness' argument is that it's the network itself that's becoming the problem for many internal threats, when security solutions should be making what he called intelligent decisions relative to each computer a company uses.

"We're the only DLP suite that can be offered as a SaaS model, and be managed through the cloud," he said. "Our whole value proposition is that we remove cost and complexity from internal threat protection. Part of what's given us the growth rate we've had is that we bring DLP to the SMB, all the way up through enterprise and all the way down to SOHO and even mom-and-pop shops. Because of the architectural difference, we can provide full functionality to a single user as easy as we can 100,000, and it's from that we're gaining traction."

About 20 percent of Awareness' business goes through channel partners, Bilyeu said, but he'd love to see that change dramatically in the coming months as the company pushes VAR recruitment.

"We started direct-only but it was clear to us early on that there were people who had this sales infrastructure already in place and had relationships already going. We wanted to leverage that. The channel forced our hand, if you will," he said.

Bilyeu said Awareness will continue to scale its offerings to meet the security demands of mobile computing -- including smartphones and handheld devices.

"The next frontier in the security space is making sure you can provide the same level of security on an iPhone or BlackBerry that you can on a netbook and a laptop," he said. "It's all about mobile, and that's where we're going to be, too."