San Francisco-based mobile security firm Lookout secured an investment Tuesday from Microsoft as the two combined their leading mobility products into one federal-friendly integrated offering.
Lookout’s Mobile Threat Protection dashboard and Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite — which already boasts more than 27,000 enterprise customers — will fuse together into a single platform that will be sold in the coming months.
Financial details surrounding the investment were undisclosed.
Smartphones, tablets and other mobile-friendly devices provide an advantageous platform to get work done at a fast pace while traveling or multitasking. But the need to secure these devices from hackers is becoming an increasingly important requirement for federal agencies, whose employees sometimes leave the premises with sensitive information stored on their devices.
Lookout’s cloud software is able to predict future cyber-risk and identify ongoing threats by accessing a live global network of mobile sensors and a data set of mobile code. By reviewing this threat intel, Lookout develops defenses that take into account hacker activity.
“Lookout protects the mobile devices of some of the world’s largest financial services, insurance, legal, consulting and entertainment firms, as well as government agencies,” a spokeswoman for the company wrote in an email to FedScoop. She, however, declined to name the specific federal agencies that Lookout services.
Microsoft, for its part, claims that EMS is the “fastest growing, largest and most comprehensive offering in the market” when it comes to “covering identity and access management, mobile management and security.”
“Companies should be harnessing the power of the intelligent cloud and mobile threat data to limit their exposure to potential security breaches. We are excited to be working closely together with Lookout to integrate these new capabilities,” Brad Anderson, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Enterprise Client & Mobility Group, said in a statement.
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