Australian security company Senetas is eyeing new government and commercial contracts after announcing this week that its encryption technologies had been certified to NATO security standards.
Senetas encryption products are already sold in more than 25 countries, company CEO Andrew Wilson explained, but the NATO certification – and subsequent inclusion of the company's products in the NATO Information Assurance Product Catalogue – was likely to expand this significantly by allowing the tools to be supplied to agencies of up to 28 NATO member states.
“Information security product certification by the leading independent international government testing authorities is a key product development and business strategy objective for Senetas,” Wilson said in a statement.
Such certifications “involve the most demanding and rigorous testing and evaluation processes,” he said. “Because these certifications are an ongoing process of review rather than just a one-off process, they are vitally important in today's environment of increased risks to data being transmitted across high-speed networks.”
Formal information-security certifications are increasingly being seen as a point of differentiation by security vendors, which are increasingly shoring up their credentials to reassure customers about the integrity of their data within cloud and other environments.
Cloud-security provider CipherCloud has also been working towards certification, announcing recently that it had achieved certification against the US National Institute of Science and Technology's FIPS 140-2 requirements. Senetas also has FIPS certification.
Willy Leichter, CipherCloud's global director of cloud security, recently told CSO Australia that the certification was a key step towards increasing the comfort levels of security-sensitive customers with new application delivery models.
“We're dealing with a lot of very conservative organisations, so any objective third-party validation always helps. We have to build confidence.”
This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.
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