Draper, Utah.-based Senforce Technologies started out making a simple Wi-Fi-specific firewall—and has come a long way since then. This week, the company said it had landed a contract covering an entire cabinet of the executive branch: the Department of Justice (DoJ).
“The U.S. Attorney’s office moved to [Senforce] months ago,” says Tanya Candia, the vice president of marketing at the company. “They couldn’t say to employees, ‘you can’t be mobile.’ Based on the results of that, they’ve signed an enterprise license.”
With that license, Senforce’s solution will be activated on 100,000 computers in 37 agencies, covering everything from the FBI to the U.S. Marshalls to the Bureau of Prisons to protect mission critical data. The deal is good for four years.
Similarly, Senforce has a contract now with the U.S. Air Force, a branch that has standardized mobile users on Panasonic Toughbooks, some of which came off the shelf with Centrino chips. Supposedly, the Air Force actually had a system integrator hired that would open the laptops up and take out the Wi-Fi miniPCI cards to disable the wireless. Now they can use Senforce to suppress the radio when needed.
Senforce provides location-aware products for both policy enforcement and threat mitigation using a core firewall called SPF+ (Senforce Portable Firewall Plus), that runs on the kernel level of an operating system—no need to answer questions on whether a software program is allowed to get Internet access, since it’s all based on corporate policy and location, run by the Senforce EMSM (Enterprise Mobile Security Management). Candia stresses that the software does more than just wired and wireless network protection, but can even prevent physical data theft, such as someone sticking a USB-based thumbdrive into a PC and trying to copy over files.
The company says its products comply with the Department of Defense Directive 8100.2 and the FIPS 140-2 standard, and let the DOJ comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act. Senforce is in the middle of tests for Army Wireless and Wired Interoperability to make sure they work with DoD’s other computers.
Senforce last week announced a deal to work with Fortress Technologies on joint sales, marketing and product development, setting the EMSM to work in tandem with the Fortress security gateway.
