Channel newbie Bromium slates end-point security rivals

Signature-based techniques no longer work, Cambridge-based security start-up claims

A start-up vendor promising to do to end-point security what Palo Alto has to firewalls is hunting for its first UK partners.

Franklyn Jones, vice president of marketing at Bromium, argued that traditional signature-based anti-virus techniques used by the likes of Symantec, McAfee, Sophos and Trend Micro no longer work.

Bromium's answer is to "protect" rather than "detect" by isolating every activity carried out outside of the corporate network in a virtual secure environment. This means that once that task is closed, any malware that might be there is also gone, explained Jones.

Jones previously worked for next-generation firewall pioneer Palo Alto and he claimed there are startling similarities between the two firms.

"Both companies are entering very mature markets dominated by multibillion-dollar companies, where there had been no innovation in quite some time, and the customers that purchased those products were largely dissatisfied with them because they did not work."

Bromium's vSentry offering is being pitched at a premium value, meaning resellers could encounter average deal sizes above $1m in the large enterprise and government sectors on which the vendor will initially focus. Although pricing for a one-time licence starts at a cool £150, Jones said customers will earn that money back because they will no longer have to shell out on maintaining infected machines.

Jones said the end-point security market, worth an estimated $10bn to $20bn depending on who you ask, is ripe for innovation.

"We are looking for a small number of partners that are willing to come in a day too early, rather than a day too late," he said. "We want resellers who are willing to lead with this."

Founded two years ago, Cambridge and Cupertino-based Bromium has garnered funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Highland Capital and Intel Capital and has already secured its first customers in the US.

Co-founder Ian Pratt, who was chief architect at Xen, said vSentry works by drawing on the hardware support built into Intel, AMD and ARM processors.

"Effectively, every activity you perform on the machine, every document you open, every web page you go to, you are effectively unwrapping a brand-new laptop, using it just for that activity, and then throwing it away," he explained. "At that point you don't care whether that website was malicious or that the document you opened contained an exploit."

VSentry currently works on laptops and desktops but will be rolled out to tablets later this year and smartphones in 2014, Pratt said. It is currently only available for Windows 7, Explorer and Microsoft Office environments.

Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst Quocirca, argued that Bromium should not yet be regarded as a solution for most organisations.

"They have got something – but it is very early days and their support is currently limited to one operating system," he said.

Tarzey added that the incumbent end-point security vendors should be given credit for updating their propositions to encompass more than just signature-based anti-virus techniques.