Ignition smashes into CASB market with Bitglass deal

Bitglass signs up first distributor following UK launch earlier this year

Security VAD Ignition Technology has added cloud access security broker (CASB) player Bitglass to its portfolio after the vendor launched in the UK earlier this year.

Bitglass has raised $80m in funding and took its first steps into the UK at the start of 2017, signing up its first UK partner and indicating that a search for a distributor had started.

Sean Remnant, chief strategy officer at Ignition, said that demand for CASB solutions has started to increase, despite the technology itself not being especially new.

"We've been watching the market for a number of years now," he said. "There have been a number of CASB vendors around but it has very much been a hype cycle where people have said ‘you need it', but the customers haven't recognised that.

"Now we're at that inflection point where people know the advantages of cloud but they want to do it safely. The good thing is that we are seeing requests for information from people so we know that it is real and there is demand. It's not just about technology and the market, it's the timing as well."

CASB products provide a secure gateway between an organisation's on-premise infrastructure and their cloud provider's infrastructure.

According to Gartner, around five per cent of large enterprises utilised a CASB product in 2015, but the analyst expects this to rise to 85 per cent by 2020.

The CASB market is currently enjoying something of a second wind, after a number of players were snapped up by larger security vendors a couple of years ago.

Imperva acquired Skyfence in 2014 before offloading it to Forcepoint in February this year.

In 2015 Microsoft and Blue Coat acquired Adallom and Elastica, respectively, while last year announced the acquisition of Palerra.

Remnant said that Ignition will hunt for around eight partners for Bitglass in the UK, and said that Cylance partners in particular should look carefully at the solution.

Earlier this year Bitglass and Cylance announced a partnership that sees the endpoint security vendor provide its prevention technology in the clouds of Bitglass customers.

"We probably want about eight partners," he said. "We don't want to over distribute, we just want to have the partners that want to work well and be focused.

"It's a great proposition as well for all of those large Microsoft partners that are doing well with Office 365. They can tag on security from a CASB perspective, but also get the anti-malware protection [from Cylance] tagged on."

Alongside appointing Ignition in the UK, Bitglass has signed up French distributor NEOVAD, and Lidera Networks for the Spanish and Portuguese markets.

Eduard Meelhuysen, EMEA sales vice president at Bitglass, said: "There has been a huge surge in demand for cloud security from enterprises as cloud adoption accelerates in the UK.

"We are fully committed to helping enterprises realise the flexibility and cost saving of the cloud, without compromising on control and visibility over data.

"We are very pleased to be rolling out the Bitglass CASB and agentless mobile security solution in partnership with Ignition Technology and look forward to building close relationships with partners in the region."