Channel at the heart of SecureAge’s UK plans

SecureAge, the data encryption specialist, is a well-known name in Asia and its home market of Singapore, but is at the start of its journey in the UK.

The security player has been in business for 17 years, with an approach that makes public key indicator-based (PKI-based) encryption part of the data protection process, with an established customer base across Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The firm set up US offices last September, taking the keys on an office in the Greater Washington DC area, run by its chief operating officer Jerry Ray. It has now turned its attention to expanding the footprint in the UK, with the channel viewed as a key way of achieving that ambition.

The UK business is headed up by experienced technical director Nigel Thorpe and sales director Nick Maslen, and they have already started to set about building relationships with partners.

Maslen said the first priority had been to set up the team in the UK but it was now moving on the focus on the channel with the aim of building a tight network of resellers .

“Like any startup when you move it out of your national country, you have to set up a team of people and it doesn’t scale to sell direct,” he said.

“We are looking to build a channel with a small number of partners. We want them to be an authorised partners,” he added.

The firm is offering decent margins on initial sales and then when annual renewals are made. “Not only do they make money, but they keep that coming in year after year,” said Maslen.

The UK team has been driving a lead-generating campaign to provide partners with targets to go after, and Maslen said it wanted to pass those onto the resellers that it could trust.

SecureAge is looking to work with partners that have good security knowledge or those that are selling to verticals, where encryption could be added to a wider data management sale. Maslen said a lot of databases remained unencrypted and would benefit from a solution that remedied that situation.

Thorpe said that many customers still failed to encrypt all of their data and the shift to remote working due to Covid-19 exacerbating the need to roll out greater levels of protection.

“With the current Covid-19 pandemic causing global chaos, the need for businesses to enable more people than ever before to work from home securely has put the spotlight on data security,” he said.

“The downside of home working is that you have people who are not working in the confines of the organisation. Cyber criminals and hackers will go for the lowest-hanging fruit, [which is] those working from home,” he added.

As an example, he said that those working on merger and acquisition (M&A) activity would now have documents stored on their local PCs that, if accessed, would contain highly sensitive information.