Mobile security is an issue for enterprises where a US-based company, Lookout, is signing up resellers in Europe. Unusually, it is focuses solely on mobile, arguing that this is enough of a specialist market to justify its business.
David Helfer, VP of Worldwide Channel Development at Lookout says there is a deep consultancy business here for VARs and integrators, and that enterprises have budgets for it. With some 20 partners in Europe and working through distributor Exclusive Networks, he says the mobility area requires a different set of skills from general enterprise security. “Enterprise mobility is all about risk assessment,” he tells IT Europa, “and security channels have to have the right skills sets and be more forensic in approach”.
Legacy security methods by themselves are not sufficient to protect against advanced mobile threats, he argues. Signatures can't scale with the pace of malicious software development and behavioural analysis lacks the context to consistently identify true risk, often creating noise amid which real security signals can be lost.
Lookout bases its predictive technology on its Global Sensor Network which monitors the worldwide population of millions of mobile devices, including 70 million users with 11 million applications, a list which is growing by 20,000 new apps every day.
Having recently named Jamie Andrews as Lookout's EMEA Partner Director, the company is looking to add partners, particularly those selling to 2000-3000 seats in the enterprise, though obviously the solutions scale up and down. It raised $200m last year specifically to build the business globally and now claims to have over 350 staff. While mobility channels have experience in that market, they are not necessarily right for this area, which require the ability to talk to CIOs and CSOs. Not that the channel for Lookout will be vast in number, because of the skills and relationships with users that are required – probably no more than 50 in total across the region.