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Fidelis Security Systems Inc. is glad that the government is finally seeing things its way.
Fidelis has for years been supplying a combined hardware-software appliance that does one thing — stops data leakage from a network. “Data leakage” is the industry term that covers a wide area of undesirable activity, including those data breaches experienced by TJX Cos. Inc. in late 2006.
Now, with Massachusetts slowly approaching a March 2010 deadline for the new company data security regulations that were enacted last fall, and a new partnership that will add to the ways Fidelis can keep data safe, the company is poised for growth that will bring it into the black, according to Kurt Bertone, vice president of strategic alliances at Fidelis, which is based in Waltham.
“The company is well-funded by top-tier venture capital companies, but we are still a small company,” he said. “Our plan is to reach cash-flow break-even with our existing funding.”
Those venture capital companies include Ascent Venture Partners and Tudor Ventures of Boston, Point Judith Capital of Rhode Island, and Inflection Point Ventures of Delaware, all of which were in Fidelis’ $22 million round in April 2008.
“The company has been around since 2002, but it was really bootstrapped by a couple of guys for several years,” Bertone said. Now at 50 employees, Fidelis has linked up with a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company to keep file transfers secure. The new partnership is with Accellion Inc., which makes its own appliance — one that pulls attachments out of an e-mail before it leaves a network and creates a path to it through a secure HTTP link, helping reduce the likelihood that confidential or valuable information gets sent across the unsecure Internet via e-mail.
With the Fidelis XPS product’s ability to do a “deep-session inspection” — essentially find out everything there is to know about any data passing through a network — applied to Accellion’s secure file transfers, the companies can now show network administrators the nature of such a file before it leaves the network or before it gets into its endpoint network. “According to Accellion, a very large percentage of data transfer is file transfer,” Bertone said. “This brings that into compliance.”
Compliance is the name of the game for companies like Fidelis, said Nick Selby, co-founder of Cambridge Infosec Associates Inc., a New York-based risk-management consultancy. But that is quickly expanding.
“The wider marketplace now is anyone who deals with customer information and is concerned with customer information and the impact of breaches of data,” he said.
While Fidelis’ traditional verticals have been those companies that had to deal with data security compliance, such as financial services firms or health-care companies, Bertone is anticipating an uptick from all sectors of the business world that hold customer data in any form, as new laws like the Bay State’s get enacted.
“The more regulations there are, the better it is, but compliance regs are not the only drivers,” Bertone said. “There is a need to protect the image and the brand of a company.”
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