20% jump in sales with half of all new customers sighting US cyber snooping scandal as major concern
Baar (Switzerland): InfoGuard, a Swiss leader in high-performance encryption solutions has announced a dramatic increase in sales of its hardware based encryption solutions following surveillance and eavesdropping scandals involving the NSA (National Security Agency) and GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters).
“Our sales of encryption technologies are pretty stable, especially as our devices typically have a life span of many years,” explains Thomas Meier, CEO of InfoGuard, “In the past; our customers have tended to be banks and financial institutions that are keenly aware of threats caused by eavesdropping attacks against networks. However, sales data for the last quarter shows wins from technology and industrial market leaders across other sectors that in the past may have overlooked encryption as irrelevant but are now waking up to the idea that state sponsored cyber surveillance is a real threat to national and international links.”
Meier estimates that sales compared to the same period in 2012 have increased by over 20% and around half of customers have mentioned issues like PRISM as a contributing factor. “We have customers from other industries that are asking for advice on how to protect their R&D, production, and business data and by proving the existence of governmental surveillance programs, the media has provided the security market with an economic growth stimulus,” says Meier.
The other factor Meier believes is contributing to increased demand for encryption is data security breach notification regulations including two new legislative proposals that under consideration by the European Commission. The first, which has drawn the most attention, was the European Commission’s proposal of a new regulation to replace the current Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC. If adopted, this Regulation would introduce a general obligation for all data controllers, across business sectors, to notify the regulator in case of a breach without undue delay, and not later than 24 hours after having become aware of it.
“There is a growing consensus that a breach of the physical communication network where all the data was encrypted would not require notification as the data is effectively unreadable,” says Meier, “As well as serving best practice, encryption is increasingly becoming a requirement is industry specific regulations such as banking and healthcare and in combination with issues like PRISM, we expect sales to increase throughout 2013 and 2014.”