Symantec To Acquire Nukona

Symantec Corp. has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nukona, Inc., a privately-held provider of mobile application management (MAM). The acquisition extends Symantec’s enterprise mobility portfolio to include a cross-platform mobile application protection solution to help IT organisations protect and isolate corporate data and applications across both corporate owned and personally owned devices. The transaction is expected to close in April and is subject to customary closing conditions. The financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

The acquisition of Nukona complements Symantec’s acquisition earlier this month of Odyssey Software, a leading provider of mobile device management (MDM). Odyssey provides the MDM foundation to enroll and manage all necessary device settings across a broad range of platforms, while Nukona provides an innovative approach to help enterprises seamlessly distribute, secure and control applications and data without requiring them to manage the devices. By offering both MDM and MAM across multiple platforms, Symantec will enable CIOs to say “yes” to the onslaught of digital natives – people born in a world of connectivity – demanding to use devices and apps of their choice. Symantec will help customers secure enterprise critical mobile apps and data while managing and protecting them with policies, including authenticating users, encrypting sensitive files, preventing data leakage and selectively wiping corporate data. These acquisitions further advance Symantec’s enterprise mobility leadership by enhancing capabilities for mobile device, application and data protection.

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“As the adoption of mobile devices and apps continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, one of the biggest challenges for customers is to protect and manage the native apps, data and environments of these devices,” said CJ Desai, senior vice president, Endpoint and Mobility Group, Symantec. “The acquisition of Nukona helps us further address the ‘Consumerisation of IT’ and ‘Bring Your Own Device’ trends by helping organisations protect and isolate corporate data and applications across both corporate owned and personally owned devices.”

With Nukona’s ability to natively protect and control iOS, Android and HTML5 apps, Symantec will address the core problem of corporate and personal data separation without limiting the end-user experience or application adoption. By securely distributing and managing mobile applications and content, Symantec customers will be able to address corporate data security concerns around data leakage, encryption and authentication on a per-application basis, for both BYOD and corporate owned devices.

Unlike traditional proprietary sandbox solutions, Symantec’s approach will extend application protection that “wraps” both native and web-based apps with a management layer that allows IT to apply security policies without requiring any changes to the applications, leaving personal apps and activities untouched. In addition, the flexibility of cloud-based and on-premise enterprise app stores helps provide a seamless and scalable way to enable mobile application deployments. Nukona’s secure content library also allows for the protection and synchronisation of documents without risk of data loss.

According to Symantec’s recent State of Mobility Survey, the average annual cost of mobile incidents for enterprises, including data loss, damage to the brand, productivity loss and loss of customer trust, was USD$429,000. However, despite the risks, an uptick in mobile applications across organisations is taking place with 71 percent of enterprises at least discussing deploying custom mobile applications and one-third currently implementing or having already implemented custom mobile applications. In addition, 59 percent of enterprises are making line-of-business applications accessible from mobile devices, representing a dramatic shift in the nature of mobility from an email extension to a core business enabler.