Avecto announced as finalist in three categories by Info Security Products Guide’s Global Excellence Awards
Manchester (UK) and Boston (USA): Avecto – the leader in Windows privilege management, yesterday announced that it is a finalist in three 2012 Global Excellence Awards categories. Info Security Products Guide - the industry's leading information security research and advisory guide, has shortlisted Avecto as Best Overall Security Company, Best New Security Start-Up Company and Innovative Company of the Year (Security). These prestigious global awards recognize security and IT vendors with advanced, ground-breaking products and solutions that are helping set the bar higher for others in all areas of technologies.
“Least privilege, as a concept, is not new but is yet to be adopted by most organizations and we do so much more than just that. We educate the security market on its importance and demonstrate how vital an aspect this is of their whole security ethos,” explains Paul Kenyon, Avecto’s COO. “While the threat from within may come from people, we understand that not everyone’s intentions are malicious. We’re constantly looking at ways of improving Privilege Guard to enhance not just the core feature set but the user experience as well, currently no other product come close to what our capabilities are at the moment.”
The growing ecosystem of insider threats identifies excessive user privileges as a significant security concern for organizations. As requirements for compliance increase, securing data as it passes through a personal computer system is crucial to satisfy auditors, and ensuring security breaches don’t result in expensive data loss. Whilst antivirus and firewalls provide some protection, these are only effective as part of a defense-in-depth security strategy. Avecto designed Privilege Guard specifically to plug the ‘Trusted Insider’ security gap, allowing IT to selectively elevate rights of individual applications and tasks, and eliminating the need to grant users local admin rights.
There are a number of features in Privilege Guard that could be behind Avecto’s selection as Innovative Company of the Year (Security). Paul speculates, “We’re the only Windows privilege management solution that includes an anti-tamper mechanism intelligent enough to distinguish between elevated processes and real system administrators. This blocks elevated processes from tampering with the agent and policies and only true system administrators can modify Privilege Guard and its configuration settings. Or perhaps it’s that we recognize people are the key to security, not the technology. For this reason we don’t stop them from doing what they need to do, just empower them to do it in a secure manner.”
As a relatively new kid on the block, but with experienced hands on the tiller, Avecto is thrilled to be shortlisted in the Best New Security Start-Up category. Paul believes it’s down to the amazing results the company has seen in the last year, “The Company experienced huge growth over the last 12 months and revenue from the North American market alone, now represents over 50% of our turnover during this period. Year on year we are doubling the size of our business with sales figures up over 350% at our financial year end in June 2011."
In conclusion, Paul sums up, “We’re so proud that, with Privilege Guard, we’ve been recognized as a leading industry player and named finalists in not one but three categories by Info Security Products Guide. We believe that we have the world’s leading Windows privilege management solution and it’s wonderful to have external audiences support this conviction. We remain committed to our customers and will continue to ensure they can deploy secure and compliant desktops and servers. This recognition from Info Security Products Guide is further validation of our dedication.”