Lookout, the global leader in mobile security, today introduced Lookout Mobile Threat Protection, which allows large enterprises to embrace mobility in the workplace while protecting company data, securing against malicious attacks, and maintaining compliance with security policies through effective risk management. Lookout’s tremendous success in the consumer market has enabled it to assemble a dataset of the world’s mobile code to track threats from known attackers and predict new, never-before-seen threats. Lookout Mobile Threat Protection extends this predictive security platform to the enterprise, helping organisations anticipate and defeat mobile threats.
According to a recent IDC report[1], “While mobile has not altered the basic tenets of computer security, nor the malicious intent of the bad guys, it does offer new pathways to exploit. Understanding where these threat vectors exist and how to effectively undermine them — through both process and technology — will be of utmost importance in enhancing security posture.” In fact, in a study of mobile devices associated with the global networks of 25 different Fortune 500 companies, Lookout found 50 serious mobile threat encounters per 1,000 mobile devices.
“In bringing Lookout’s predictive security model to large enterprises, we seek to close the gap in an enterprise’s security strategy that results from simply managing mobile devices, not securing them,” said Aaron Cockerill, VP of Products at Lookout. “As mobile devices become the predominant productivity tool in the enterprise and the number of devices in an organisation multiplies, CISOs are being left in the dark as to the risks that these devices introduce. Lookout Mobile Threat Protection offers not just visibility, but protection from these risks.”
More than 70 million consumers worldwide have chosen Lookout for personal mobile security. These users feed threat intelligence into the Lookout Security Platform, which accesses virtually all the mobile code in the world including a dataset of more than 11 million apps to make accurate security predictions. Gartner recently recognised Lookout as a “Cool Vendor,” seen by the company as validation of this predictive security model.[2]
Lookout Mobile Threat Protection uses this comprehensive knowledge of the mobile ecosystem to allow enterprises to define and manage risk for their mobile device users. The result is powerful mobile security that does not impede business productivity, ensuring strong adoption across the organisation. Specific features of Lookout Mobile Threat Protection include:
● Advanced malware protection: Go beyond signatures and behavioral analysis with the Lookout Security Platform, which predicts attacks before an app exhibits suspicious behavior or does harm to an organisation.
● Risky app management: Distinguish between malicious apps and those that exhibit risky behaviors that may violate a company’s security posture, such as exfiltrating contacts to foreign servers.
● Risk management based on user groups: Manage risk based on certain user characteristics, such as geography, department or seniority within an organisation.
● Sideloaded app detection: Gain visibility into all installed apps that did not come from an official app store and may have malicious capabilities.
● Advanced root and jailbreak detection: Uncover compromised devices, even when common detection evasion techniques are used.
● MDM integration: Leverage current MDM investments for simple device provisioning and to remediate or quarantine devices identified by Lookout as risky. Lookout’s MDM partners include Airwatch by VMware and MobileIron.
● Delightful user experience: Ensure adoption with a lightweight, design-centric mobile application that preserves battery life and alleviates privacy concerns.
● Cross-platform protection: Secure both Android and iOS devices.
Lookout is already working with more than two dozen beta customers, which include some of the world’s largest financial services, insurance, legal, consulting and entertainment firms. From day one, Lookout will sell Mobile Threat Protection entirely through value added resellers and distributors and many of these committed channel partners are also beta participants.
Comments on the news:
● “We wouldn’t think of running our desktops or our networks without security software so why would we run these mini computing devices without a similar kind of threat protection?” said Lori Richards, Director, IT Governance, Risk Management and Compliance at FCCI Insurance Group. “Lookout is helping us protect our devices without restricting the user experience or impacting productivity. We’ve successfully used Lookout Mobile Threat Protection on our Android tablets for some time and plan to enroll our iOS devices and integrate Lookout with our MDM in the near future.”
● “An increasing number of our staff conduct their work on their smartphones and tablets and yet, we have had no visibility into the threats that we know are frequently targeting their devices,” said Chris Spence, CTO of NDI, an organisation dedicated to helping people around the world build more democratic societies. “The nature of our work unfortunately attracts cyber-criminals, but Lookout helps protect our mission and our people by allowing us to get ahead of advanced threats on mobile.”
● “The demand for mobile threat protection is clear,” said Greg Christensen, President of Emergent, an award-winning IT solutions provider. “By partnering with Lookout, we can help our customers take advantage of all the benefits of mobility without putting their organisation’s security posture at risk.”
● “Lookout is a very exciting security vendor because of its powerful big data analytics technology based on machine intelligence, and the credibility it has already amassed with the biggest mobile operators in the world,” said Barrie Desmond, COO at Exclusive Group, a global value-added services and technologies group. “The Lookout solution itself is perfectly suited to the channel. It’s extremely flexible, integrates seamlessly into any environment, and is the perfect complement to many other solutions in our Exclusive Networks portfolio.”
● “BYOD has become standard practice across many organisations today, but for all the benefits of this model, bringing personal mobile devices into an enterprise can introduce significant risk to an organisation that needs to be contained,” said Stacy Crook, Research Director, Mobile Enterprise at IDC. “Mobile security solutions such as Lookout Mobile Threat Protection can help organisations embrace the mobile experience by providing visibility into current and predicted threats and establishing baselines of trust for mobile devices—while not requiring the device to be locked down.”
● “Lookout’s SaaS solution offers a compelling answer to the growing security challenge facing enterprises, as more data and applications are accessed via mobile devices,” said Alastair Edwards, Principal Analyst at Canalys. “However, what sets Lookout apart from many SaaS competitors is launching with a fully indirect go-to-market model. This will create trust within distributors and resellers, as well as give Lookout access to important services and integration skills within the channel, and a route into new customers. The choice of resell or managed services models gives Lookout the flexibility to align with the business models of different partner types. New SaaS vendors starting with a direct model often struggle to recruit partners at a later date.”
[1] IDC, Five Key Trends for Mobile Security in 2015, doc #254243, February 2015
2 Gartner Cool Vendors in Security Infrastructure Protection, 2015, Ray Wagner, Joseph Feiman, Avivah Litan, Neil MacDonald, Lawrence Orans, Peter Firstbrook, John Girard, Dionisio Zumerle, April 2015.
Availability
Lookout Mobile Threat Protection will be generally available on 30 June.
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Links
www.lookout.com
