U.S. data breaches reached an all-time high in 2016 with 1,093 incidents, according to one report — 40 percent more than 2015. That trend is fueling robust growth for IT security firm Lepide, which recently announced Austin as its new global headquarters.
While many solutions provide protection against outside attacks, the company has targeted the area of intentional and accidental inside jobs.
And it’s paid off.
Lepide's sales increased 76 percent over the past 12 months, and it's poised to outpace that number through the remainder of the year. The company currently has offices in London and India, but because of strong growth in the U.S., decided its new offices at 600 Congress Ave. would become Lepide's home base.
“I visited Austin three months ago when we were trying to find our office and thought, 'What a cool place to be,’ ” CEO Aidan Simister said. “We visited San Francisco and New York City, and Austin gave us the right balance of the right talent, at the right cost with the right demand.”
Lepide’s solutions provide IT teams with a bird’s-eye view of their organization's data access, tracking any and all changes made to critical files and folders over the network. That reduces the risk of user privilege abuse and its costly consequences, including data leakage, downtime, customer fraud and failed compliance.
“When people think about data leaving their organization, they’re thinking about a big data breach,” Simister said. “Yes, that’s important, but actually the more likely problem is every single day someone is doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. It’s like a dripping effect, and slowly information is leaking out of the organization.”
For example, one of Lepide's clients from the banking sector processed expense reports over a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet would be sent to HR for approval, then once it was approved, the spreadsheet would be moved to another folder. Simister said that when one of the client’s employees realized he had access to the folder, he would go in and increase the expense amount to the file HR had already approved.
“The fundamental problem is that they had no mechanism in place for real-time alerts or reports on that folder,” Simister said. “Unless you have something like our solution in place, how do you know it’s happening?”
In addition to banks, Lepide’s most common customers include organizations with larger user counts, stretch budgets and compliance demand, in sectors such as healthcare, education, insurance, government and law.
Lepide's team includes 236 employees across its global offices. The Austin headquarters will be adding 50 roles in sales, marketing and product management over the next 18 months.
“We’re very high energy as an organization,” Simister said. “I want go-getters who can think creatively and who can feel they own a part of this organization. That’s very much a part of our culture.”
Images provided by Lepide and Shutterstock.
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