Cybersecurity is a major industry with largely untapped growth potential. The recent surge of data breaches, business, and agency, hacks as well an international scandal revolving around unlawful access of new vaccine data are just some of the reminders of how fragile our information infrastructure is. In response to the hack attack on the European Medicines Agency, the European Union on Wednesday unveiled plans to upgrade the 27-nation bloc’s dated cybersecurity rules. According to a report by the Associated Press, last year, the E.U. recorded around 450 cyber incidents involving European infrastructure, notably in the financial and energy sectors. The pandemic has highlighted Europe’s deep dependence on the internet and further exposed security weaknesses. “The time of innocence is over. We know that we are a target,” Commission Vice-President Margaritis Schinas told reporters. “We need to modernize, reinforce, and adapt.” Plurilock Security Inc. (TSX-V: PLUR) (OTC: PLCKF), Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ: MIME), Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ: FTNT), CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWD)
The emergence of new technologies such as IoT, BYOD, AI, and machine learning is a factor contributing to the spike of hacks and a mitigating factor. For example, the adoption of M2M/IoT connections demands strengthened cybersecurity services in enterprises, yet machine learning provides advantages in outlier detection, much to cybersecurity. According to Mordor Intelligence data, the cybersecurity market was valued at USD 161.07 Billion in 2019. It is expected to reach USD 363.05 Billion by 2025 while registering a CAGR of 14.5% during 2020-2025.
Plurilock Security Inc. (TSX-V: PLUR) (OTC: PLCKF) just announced breaking news that the company, “an innovative cybersecurity company that provides frictionless and continuous authentication using machine learning and behavioral biometrics, is pleased to provide the following corporate update for the fourth quarter of 2020.
Industry Outlook
Cybersecurity is a crucial element for organizations with deep security needs, such as healthcare and financial services companies. Given the nature of recent cyberattacks that target these organizations, the need for advanced cybersecurity solutions will increase. According to Cyber Security Ventures, Global Cybersecurity spending is predicted to exceed USD 1 Trillion from 2017-2021.
In preparation for the cybersecurity sector’s anticipated growth, Plurilock has made some key developments since going public this year to address and capitalize on this global opportunity.
Key Developments
Public Listing
On September 24th, 2020, the Company began trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker PLUR after completing a qualifying transaction (“QT”) with Libby K Industries, Inc. on September 17, 2020. Plurilock also completed concurrent financing with the QT, which saw the Company successfully raised $2.6 million. The concurrent financing was led by PI Financial and included Industrial Alliance Securities.
Expert Advisory Board and Advisors
The Company assembled an Advisory Board consisting of technology sector experts to guide Plurilock on planning and executing strategic initiatives while accelerating the growth of the Company. Members of the Advisory Board include Dr. Issa Traoré, Ph.D., Merv Chia, and Mark Orsmond.
Additionally, the Company appointed two veteran multinational security leaders, Gaétan Houle, and Chris Pierce, as advisors to the Company. Mr. Houle has held various security leadership roles in reputable government agencies such as the Canadian Federal Government, Department of National Defence, and the former Department of Foreign Affairs, now known as Global Affairs Canada. Mr. Pierce is an accomplished executive and consultant who oversaw the international division of Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation and led the development of Booz Allen’s international business strategy.
Partnerships and Relationships
- A new product collaboration with identity and access management (“IAM”) provider Gluu, including the inclusion of native Plurilock support in standard Gluu releases from now on.
- The services of Government Sales Specialists, LLC, an outsourced federal sales agency, were retained by the Company to grow its government sales pipeline.
- Completion of the first milestone of a US$198,000 contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, for which the Company received US$70,000.
- A major US financial services firm awarded a US$42,000 annual recurring contract to Plurilock to deploy the Company’s core authentication solutions.
Certification and Compliance Program –
The Company launched its new certification and compliance program in November 2020, engaging highly regarded automated security and compliance firm Vanta Inc. to provide advisory services in pursuit of System and Organization Controls 2 (“SOC2”) standard compliance.
Core Product Initiatives and Updates
The Company engaged in and launched several product-related items and initiatives, including:
- The launch of Plurilock’s new mobile applications for iOS and Android is now available for download on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
- Release a new version of Plurilock’s core ADAPT and DEFEND software platform, adding support for enterprise-environment proxy services, new versions for Mac OS, and enhanced server reliability.
- The launch of a re-engineered customer service and support experience to optimize issue mean-time-to-resolution (“MTTR”) and accelerate client assistance availability.
2021 Outlook – During 2021, the Company plans to continue focusing on several initiatives to drive its growth strategy, including:
- Strategic M&A activity with a focus on profitable organizations with which the Company can cross-sell existing high margin Plurilock products
- Organic sales growth through established channel partners and a direct sales force
- Further investment in the company’s MFA authentication technology and IP portfolio
- Additional platform integrations that can expand sales
- Investor awareness initiatives
“2020 was an exciting year for the team at Plurilock as we completed several milestones, including a successful public listing on the TSXV in September,” said Ian Paterson, CEO of Plurilock. “Despite the headwinds of the pandemic, we have seen an increase in enterprise customers looking to secure their infrastructure from cyber threats. Given the growth outlook of the sector, we believe in 2021 the team we have assembled will enable us to grow organically through direct sales to enterprise customers while we seek to deploy resources through acquisitions strategically.”
About Plurilock – Plurilock is an innovative, identity-centric cybersecurity company that reduces or eliminates the need for passwords, extra authentication steps, and cumbersome authentication devices. Plurilock’s software leverages state-of-the-art behavioral-biometric, environmental, and contextual technologies to provide invisible, adaptive, and risk-based authentication solutions with the lowest possible cost and complexity. Plurilock enables organizations to compute safely-and with peace of mind.
Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ: MIME) announced back in October that it has selected Smartsheet to drive strategic enterprise initiatives across its organization, digitally transform its processes, and better service its global customer base. “Innovation is a necessity as we continue to arm our customers with an enterprise-grade security platform, and to drive effective strategic initiatives that transform and grow our business is a critical part of this,” said Mark Bilbe, Chief of Staff at Mimecast. “Smartsheet’s intuitive platform gives our executive team the real-time visibility and insights needed to understand the exact status of our organization-wide strategic initiatives to make informed business decisions and drive business innovation.” As more companies leverage the leading SaaS security solution, Mimecast looked to scale its strategic enterprise initiatives but needed to develop a standardized process to increase overall efficiency and speed.
Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS) announced last week Zscaler Cloud Protection, a comprehensive portfolio that simplifies and automates protection for workloads on and between any cloud platform. The new solution minimizes attack surfaces and automates globally enforced security policies across organizations’ multi-cloud footprint. This extends a zero-trust approach to cloud workloads, delivering the same high performance and reliability that over 4,500 Zscaler customers trust to protect the private application and internet access. “Hub International has embraced a cloud-first strategy to drive aggressive growth,” said Jeremy Embalabala, Vice President, Information Security at HUB International. “Zscaler Cloud Protection helps us deliver security and compliance across our growing, multi-cloud environments. Continuous assurance and automation ensure that we are always aware of our security posture, regardless of how fast things change.”
Fortinet, Inc. (NASDAQ: FTNT) announced earlier this month new integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to further provide customers with advanced security across their cloud platforms, applications, and network. Fortinet’s cloud security solutions – including its virtual next-generation firewall, FortiGate VM, and web application firewall (WAF), FortiWeb – are designed to protect workloads and business applications on-premises data centers and cloud environments. Fortinet is continuing to provide a broad set of natively integrated security solutions using AWS to provide customers with full visibility and control of applications and centralized management across cloud and hybrid environments. Fortinet Managed IPS Rules Powered by FortiGuard Labs: Fortinet provides managed IPS rulesets powered by threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs for the recently introduced AWS Network Firewall. This is a new managed service that makes it easy to deploy essential network protections for all of a customer’s Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs).
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWD) announced last week the release of the annual CrowdStrike Services Cyber Front Lines Report, which brings together the insights and observations of CrowdStrike’s global incident response (IR) and proactive services teams in 2020. reveals the broad-reaching impact remote work has had on cybersecurity, as corporate networks worldwide were turned inside out to accommodate remote workers. “Remote work has redefined the playing field between cyber attackers and defenders, and that’s clearly demonstrated in the CrowdStrike Services Cyber Front Lines Report. Corporate networks now span both office and home, providing a wealth of new attack surfaces and vectors that adversaries can exploit,” said Shawn Henry, chief security officer and president of CrowdStrike Services at CrowdStrike. “Holistic coordination and continued vigilance are key in detecting and stopping sophisticated intrusions. Because of this, we see a necessary shift from one-off emergency engagements to continuous monitoring and response. This will better enable incident response teams to help customers drastically reduce the average time to detect, investigate, and remediate from 162 hours to less than 60 minutes.”
