Zecurion featured in CRN as Emerging Vendor

Zecurion Looks for VARs to ZAPP Data Theft Concerns

Number of Channel Partners: 2 in North America, aiming for 50 by year's end

Ideal Channel Partner: Small business-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Zecurion focuses on data protection from internal threats, an increasing concern to CIOs and CTOs. Now the company is recruiting solution providers for its new U.S. channel program.

The Lowdown: Security vendor Zecurion has launched a new channel program in the U.S. to try to recruit more VARs and help end users protect their corporate data.

Established in 2001, Moscow-based Zecurion hopes to cash in on what it sees as a growing trend of corporate America looking to protect its data from internal security threats as well as external.

"For many years enterprise security was considered a protection of the corporate perimeter from outside threats, hackers, viruses and so on. Now, the perception of CIOs and CEOs is moving forward to internal security," said Alexey Raevsky, CEO of Zecurion. "They're beginning to understand that company employees may also be a threat for information security."

Zecurion developed products for the encryption of physical storage, such as hard drives, data storage and mobile storage such as USB sticks and MP3 players, Raevsky said. The company also sells products to control outgoing Internet traffic, e-mail and more, which can be used to send information outside the perimeter.

Zecurion cited a 2008 FBI study that found that 97 percent of businesses had an antivirus solution in place, 94 percent had a firewall, but only 56 percent had a data file encryption solution.

The company has more than 5,000 deployments worldwide, mostly in Europe, and is just beginning to market to North America, executives said. Zecurion plans to derive all its U.S. revenue from partners, Raevsky said. Starting from scratch, the company hopes to recruit 50 partners by the end of the year with its new Zecurion Advantage Partner Program.

"What a VAR needs to understand is that [data loss] is the No. 1 problem, yet it's No. 7 on the list of tools being applied to the security fabric. That's why we feel we will have great success focusing on an underserved market," said Ken Beam, president of The VAR-City, a consulting firm advising Zecurion.