F-Secure Product Family Wins The European Information Technology Prize

Helsinki, Finland, November 25, 1996 - Data Fellows’ F-Secure, a strong encryption product family, is the Grand Prize Winner of The European IT Prize. On 25th of November 1996, The European IT Prize Executive Jury, consisting of European executives from industry and university made the nomination. The European IT Prize/EURO-CASE Secretariat received 253 applications from 25 European countries.

F-Secure products, based on SSH encryption technology and developed by Data Fellows, build an unbreakable tunnel around network transactions using exceptionally strong encryption technology to secure and authenticate all traffic between clients and servers. More than 800 major organizations around the world are already using the SSH technology to protect their mission-critical data.

The SSH technology used by the F-Secure product family is an extraordinary innovation by any standards. It has become the de-facto standard for Internet encryption in 12 months.

It is estimated that by 1997, 75 million users will be connected to the Internet. More than 50 million of these users will be newcomers, having joined the Internet during 1996. According to estimations made by different consulting companies, the amount of Internet users will double during 1997, reaching 150 million. Furthermore, IDC estimates that by the year 2000 the Internet will provide a US $10 billion market to the IT sector. Furthermore, the recent study by the Yankee Group shows business-to-business Internet commerce will surge to $134 billion by 2000.

A major obstacle to the realization of these projections is the lack of data security in the Internet. Security is vital especially in electronic commerce and the Intranets of organizations. Firewalls are not able to secure transactions made over publicly accessible networks such as the Internet.

In the future Internet technology will be used in such fields as TV entertainment, telephones, xerox machines, faxes and teller machines. All these and other usages of the Internet will need to incorporate strong crypto-technologies in order to be successfully deployed.