Software Developer Acquires Maryland Data Protection Company as Industry Battles Hackers
With hacking incidents on the rise, data protection has become a critically important area for companies worldwide.
Gemalto NV’s acquisition of Belcamp, Maryland’s SafeNet Inc. is part of this ongoing trend. The Amsterdam-based company will pay $890 million for Safenet, which forecasts revenue of $370 million and profit from operations of $51 million for this year. Safenet’s clients include Bank of America, Starbucks, and Netflix.
Gemalto, a pioneer in smart-card chips, has sold authentication devices and security software to banks, governments, and corporations, including Microsoft and Boeing. It hopes to expand its reach with the purchase of Safenet.
According to recent news accounts, hackers in Russia have obtained 1.2 billion sets of user names and passwords across the Internet. Other headline-making incidents have affected such companies as eBay and SnapChat. A serious data breach at Target a year ago led to widespread concern and the dismissal of the company’s CEO.
The University of Maryland had two significant data breaches in 2014. One of them put the records of roughly 288,000 people at risk. The security failure demonstrated that educational institutions, which often store valuable personal and financial data, are as vulnerable as online merchants and other businesses.
Gemalto and other companies seek to make data secure and ensure that, if data is somehow accessed, it is encrypted in a way that makes it useless.
The Maryland Venture Fund, run by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, recently made a new investment in KoolSpan, a company specializing in mobile security encryption. The Fund had previously invested $300,000, to which it has now added $400,000. The company grew 1,000 percent over the previous year and plans to employ 100 by year end.
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