Artificial Intelligence and the rapidly evolving threat landscape have increased awareness around the need for secure, enterprise out of band communications
ArmorText, which safeguards communication for organizations worldwide, closed out 2023 growing 300% in Europe, adding two new product lines, and expanding into six new critical infrastructure industries including banking, financial services, telecom, and healthcare.
The introduction of DORA and NIS-2 has made it imperative for European organizations to address cybersecurity preparedness and Incident Response programs. To respond to the pressing needs around secure, enterprise out of band communication in the region, ArmorText launched its European business line, seeing a 1.5X increase in inbound leads and tripling its customer base in the region.
ArmorText lies at the intersection of two rapidly evolving trends:
- Today’s hackers don’t bother with classic encrypt and extort ransomware, instead opting for a much more sophisticated approach of infiltrating organization’s most critical communications channels to locate sensitive information with which to extort and disrupt recovery efforts. “Humans are the weakest link in any cyber security strategy,” says Matt Calligan, Director of Growth Markets at ArmorText, “and enterprise communications tools are guaranteed to have humans in them.”
- Increasing regulations and guidance from NYDFS, SEC, CFTC, TSA, DOJ, and NERC in the US and new European regulations DORA and NIS-2 make it clear that organizations are expected to meet business records retention requirements, regardless of the circumstances or technologies used.
This creates the perfect storm during a cyber attack where organizations can’t trust their day-to-day enterprise communications tool, but also can’t use a consumer app like Signal or WhatsApp because they don’t meet regulatory requirements, including the ability to retain business records.
To make matters worse, AI-enabled threat actors can now better spoof their victims, including generating written, voice, and video communications in real-time of real-life persons that are virtually indistinguishable from the real McCoy, enabling novel attacks for which most organizations are severely underprepared. Trusted communications channels that are more resilient against such attacks are a necessity for incident response today.
“We are seeing traditional communication channels like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom consistently being exploited during cyberattacks,” said Navroop Mitter, CEO, ArmorText. “Using these channels severely impacts an organization’s ability to keep sensitive information away from attackers leading up to an attack and to effectively respond should one occur. What is needed is a truly secure out of band collaboration (SOOB-C) solution that keeps sensitive information away from attackers – before, during, and after an attack – with centralized enterprise controls crucial for regulatory, statutory, and legal compliance.”
ArmorText’s suite of products fills a gap in the market as the only 100% cloud-based, secure, enterprise out of band communication offering. In the United States, 80% of households already get their power from a utility company running ArmorText and 87% of American nuclear reactors are run by an ArmorText energy provider.
Significant Growth in Critical Infrastructure Industries
Already a trusted partner for organizations in utilities, manufacturing, defense industrial base, government, and other critical sectors, ArmorText has expanded into new industries over the last 18 months. ArmorText has experienced a 33% increase in Fortune 500 customers and a dramatic uptick in financial services and banking industries – which now make up 25% of ArmorText’s revenue – up from 5% just over a year ago.
Last year ArmorText added additional clients in new industries including central banking, tier 1 telecommunications providers, global providers of stock market indices and independent credit ratings, and large travel center gas station operations in the US.
In addition to Europe, ArmorText was 1 of 14 companies selected by the Government of Canada as a Preferred Vendor Under the Federal Government’s Cybersecurity Procurement Vehicle. This will allow ArmorText to serve a broad spectrum of Canadian government organizations and agencies.
Expansion in Product Offerings
Expanding globally isn’t the only area of growth; this year, ArmorText added two innovative product lines to further meet the out of band needs of their clients, both of which are already profitable:
- The Secure Gateway enables end-to-end encrypted integrations for critical data feeds, addressing the plain text vulnerabilities in traditional integrations for platforms like Teams or Slack.
- Crisis Response Reserve Capacity enables rapid, out of band distribution of onboarding credentials and signup instructions to extended teams for rapid onboarding during a crisis. This is an industry-first, pay for what you use license model that delivers substantial savings for ArmorText Clients needing the option to quickly scale their out of band communications during a crisis to larger portions of their organization.
“By replacing Slack and Microsoft Teams for the major threat-sharing groups, ArmorText became a household name in the electricity industry by first proving that more trustworthy tech encourages more active sharing, leading to more valuable and thriving intel communities,” continued Calligan. “This led to electricity companies expanding their use of ArmorText into other out of band use cases, like incident response. It’s exciting to now see other industries coming to us first for incident response then realizing they can also use ArmorText for threat sharing, critical alert management, traveling executives, internal investigations – even day-to-day SOC chatter. It’s a sign that the entire secure out of band communications market is maturing and that we’re continuing to advance that edge forward through innovation.”
“ArmorText has become a cornerstone of our incident response offering. It has empowered us to guarantee our clients robust, secure communications, regardless of the threat landscape. With the addition of the Crisis Response Reserve Capacity, we now can instantly scale secure communications during a crisis, ensuring business continuity and operational resilience for our clients and our own teams.” – a leading Fortune 500 global technology services provider
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