Reseller BEW Global Sees Cloud Outpacing On-Premise

Up until last year, the 10-year-old Denver-based company did security assessments and installed on-premise, data loss prevention software and appliances from companies such as Symantec, McAfee, RSA, Cisco and Blue Coat. Customers could manage the systems themselves or hire BEW Global to take care of maintenance and upgrades.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the company started testing its cloud-based DLP system with three customers. Last week the service became generally available. "We believe the majority of our business in the future will actually be a cloud-based data loss prevention solution with some hybrid components," Robert Eggebrecht, chief executive of BEW Global, said Friday.

Those components are typically where companies store sensitive data that DLP systems scan to ensure the information is used in compliance with company policies. DLP systems also monitor network traffic for data movement, such as e-mail and Web traffic, as well as laptops, desktops and more recently, smartphones and tablets. Rather than move all the data to its servers, BEW Global avoids having the customer pay for additional bandwidth by taking only the information needed for tracking.

Companies are looking to DLP to protect intellectual property and to comply with government regulations and recommendations from legal departments. The worldwide market is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 17.4 percent through 2015, when it is expected to reach $808 million, according to IDC.

As an example of how the technology can be useful, a Dallas company was changing the way it handles credit-card data, when it mistakenly moved 80,000 active numbers into an unprotected file-sharing system. BEW Global, which was hired after the incident, would have caught that problem had it been monitoring the system, Eggebrecht said. Instead, it was discovered later during an audit of the credit-card processing system.

Roughly 90 percent of 50-employee BEW Global's business is in on-premise DLP technology with the rest from its cloud service. The privately held company expects revenue from the latter to grow 50 percent this year at least through 2013, according to Eggebrecht. Its on-premise business is expected to rise 30 percent this year.

BEW Global, which has more than 300 customers, including 20 Fortune 500 companies, is selling its cloud service to organizations ranging from 15 to 50,000 employees, Eggebrecht said. The company is selling across industries, such as cable, entertainment, insurance and financial services. "The most important thing that these companies are looking for are two pieces of value: one is risk reduction and the second is operational efficiency."

BEW Global's cloud service incorporates Symantec DLP, Proofpoint e-mail security, Blue Coat Web security and EMC-owned RSA's security information and event management system.