Zerify Inc (ZRFY)

[dounome]

By Research 2.0

SUMMARY
Most enterprises were forced to reevaluate their security in 2011 after a tidal wave of major security breaches and new mandates for firms in financial services. Most are now in the implementation stages, which is allowing some smaller companies to take share from the large established players. In particular, anything that doesn’t use multiple factors and so-called “Out-of-Band (OOB)” techniques is suspect. It’s now clear that keystrokes need to be en-crypted to avoid hijacking of user data streams and online sessions.
We are shifting away from logins, RSA tokens, anti-virus scanning and challenge questions to multi-factor security and the use of Out-of-Band (OOB) methods. At the same time, mobile devices are quickly becoming the primary end-user access point. Mobile device management with improved security is one of the hottest categories in 2012 enterprise IT spending. User protection and data loss prevention are a top priority.
StrikeForce Technologies, Inc. (StrikeForce) is one of a handful of small innovative companies delivering the lead-ing solutions for multi-factor and out-of-band authentication. Although other companies are spending more on marketing, StrikeForce developed some of these key technologies long before others and have secured a key patent on OOB authentication with other patents pending.
The most surprising thing about StrikeForce is that for a tiny company they have the best enterprise scale solution for user authentication and data loss prevention. This is partially explained by their management team which in-cludes the CTO steeped in information security and a former staff member at Bell Labs and the CEO who was a CIO of JPMorganChase. Our discussions with customers repeatedly back up their enterprise advantage.
One emergent theme from our work in this space is that the combination of both strong encryption and OOB methods is what is really needed to secure user access and prevent data loss. StrikeForce is the only company cur-rently delivery this combination of technologies into the enterprise environment.
Included in our report are some survey results from a recent Aberdeen report1 highlighting this area as something they are seeing increasingly in their day-to-day research inquiries and surveys. Not only is OOB at the top of their “interest index” but they also note the importance of the StrikeForce patent. Another recent study by TheInfoPro concluded that spending on Mobile Device Management (MDM) is the strongest segment of network security and services.2
StrikeForce is poised for a strong 2012 on the back of a number of major customer wins in financial services, ex-panded distribution agreements and new products that will be previewed at the upcoming RSA conference in late February. We believe StrikeForce is an important technology asset that is growing in value in an undeniably ex-panding area. The current public market value of the company is only a fraction of our estimate of intrinsic value.
Next week StrikeForce will be presenting at the American Growth Capital and then showing off some new tech-nology offerings for the Apple OS and mobile devices like the iPad at the big RSA security conference.