Home users are buying fewer PCs, choosing instead smartphones and tablets that are being incorporated, as BYOD, into the enterprise IT infrastructure. The balance is shifting from Dell’s traditional domain, the desktop, to the data itself whether in transit to the mobile device or at rest on it.
Dell has responded this year with some notable acquisitions in both computing and security. It bought Wyse, gaining a strong foothold into the burgeoning thin client and virtualized desktop market, for around $1 billion; and followed this with the purchase of SonicWall for a further $1.2 billion. Now it is extending its security reach to the mobile end-point with the purchase of Credant Technologies for an undisclosed amount.
Credant is a data protection and end-point security company. It provides data-centric encryption to protect data in flight and at rest. Its end-point disk encryption is certified to FIPS 140-2 Level 3, the highest available commercially; and it can remotely manage both end-point encryption and authentication policies from a single console. The company claims to secure more than 2 million endpoints in all walks of industry.
“In today’s work environment data is always in-flight,” explained Jeff Clarke, president of end user computing solutions at Dell; “from work being done on a local PC, being sent via email, stored on a USB drive and saved in the cloud. Each one of those experiences represents a potential security risk. As a result, businesses need a data protection strategy that is comprehensive, flexible and easy to deploy. The Credant assets,” he said, “will complement and extend current Dell device security features to make Dell Latitude, OptiPlex and Dell Precision computers among the world’s most secure.” And hopefully even more attractive to the enterprise.