Espoo, Finland - April 19, 2000
F-Secure announces European VPN partnership with Cisco and iD2
F-Secure Corporation announced on April 12th that it will partner with
Cisco Systems and privately-held iD2 Technologies to build a European VPN
solution. This solution will provide customers of the three companies with
a completely functional Smart Card-enabled VPN solution with centralized
policy based management and integrated PKI technology.
F-Secure and iD2 build on Cisco's SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrollment
Protocol) support to be able to integrate into Cisco's VPN Infrastructure.
"We are building a European full security solution. Smart Card integration
is not such a big issue in the US, but in Europe we do get a lot of demand
for VPNs with Smart Cards," says Risto Siilasmaa, President and CEO of
F-Secure Corporation. "As security VPNs shift from the WAN to the LAN and
are connected to a PKI solution, we have the strongest and most
comprehensive offering available."
The new partnership is expected to bring in new significant customer leads
during this fall. The partnership could be described as close field-level
partnering where all three parties share information on opportunities and
jointly discover the best way to fulfil the customer's needs.
Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia: a common framework for mobile e-business
F-Secure has also taken the wireless route, bringing security applications
and security management to that world as well (also see below). This
announcement represents a very favourable direction taken by the key mobile
vendors, i.e. standardizing on key security elements in WAP.
F-Secure believes the new mobile devices are simply computers with a small
footprint and a wireless network connection. As they become integrated into
the corporate IT systems they face the same security requirements as
traditional laptops. F-Secure focuses on providing PC type content security
and integrity services to these devices complementing the authentication
and communication security technology from the mobile phone manufacturers.
"We're happy to see that our message, which is that security really belongs
in the end user's workstation, be it wireline or wireless, coincides with
this announcement of the leading mobile vendors," says Ari Hypponen, Chief
Technology Officer at F-Secure. "We intend to benefit from these emerging
standards and contribute to them as well. For example, the need to provide
virus protection and malicious code prevention at the mobile terminal
becomes increasingly pronounced as data is encrypted end-to-end."
F-Secure launches a Wireless Security Competence Center
F-Secure agreed to acquire privately-held Modera Point Oy of Oulu, Finland
on April 3rd. Modera Point develops solutions on new mobile platforms. The
employees of Modera Point will form F-Secure's new Wireless Security
Competence Center.
"This acquisition strengthens F-Secure's strategy of extending its leading
security architectures into the wireless space," says Risto Siilasmaa.
"F-Secure will gain approximately 20 developers trained and proficient in
the EPOC operating system environment. These people will form the nucleus
of our new wireless security team for the EPOC platform."
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