1 Introduction
comforte AG is a privately held software company specializing in data protection and digital payments solutions based in Wiesbaden, Germany. The company’s roots can be traced back to 1998 when its founders came to the market with a connectivity solution for HPE NonStop systems – a fault-tolerant self-healing server platform for critical business applications, which is still widely used in banking and financial services, as well as in manufacturing, retail, and healthcare industries.
Soon, the solution for secure communications between mission-critical systems was adopted by a number of large banking and retail organizations. During later years, comforte AG’s offering has evolved into a comprehensive solution for protecting sensitive business data with encryption and tokenization, tailored specifically for critical use cases that do not allow even minimal downtime. With wholly owned subsidiaries in key geographies beyond Europe – USA, Australia, and Singapore – the company has a strong global presence, currently serving over 500 customers around the world, with more than forty large Fortune 500 enterprises among them, still primarily from the banking and financial sectors.
However, as modern businesses across all verticals continue their rapid digitalization, the need to store, process and exchange data securely is becoming an essential business continuity factor for any company. Although some industries have experienced strong compliance regulations for specific types of information like financial transactions or healthcare records for decades, the introduction of much broader data protection regulations like GDPR has put massive pressure on just about any organization that has to store and process personal data.
On the other hand, as the growing number of high-profile data breaches indicates, even the largest businesses are still struggling with implementing consistent enterprise-wide information security measures. Setting up various security tools for numerous different applications, services, and heterogeneous systems and then making them work together efficiently is such a massive challenge that even the prospect of paying huge fines for compliance violations apparently does not motivate these companies enough.
There is however an alternative approach that has been gaining traction recently – data-centric security. While simple in theory – just protect the data at its source instead of securing each piece of infrastructure separately – its successful deployment depends critically on the solution’s capability to enforce the same security and compliance policies consistently across all systems (be it on-premises servers, cloud services, databases, mainframes or anything else) and the effort needed to integrate it with existing modern and legacy applications.
A few years ago, comforte AG has entered the data-centric security market with their SecurDPS Enterprise solution that combines the company’s patented stateless tokenization algorithm, proven highly scalable and fault-tolerant architecture, flexible access control and policy management, augmented by a broad range of transparent integration options, which allow various existing applications to be quickly included into the enterprise-wide deployment without any changes in infrastructure or code. With SecurDPS Enterprise, any organization can thus join the data-centric revolution relatively quickly and enjoy the same level of enterprise-grade data protection and compliance as the world’s biggest financial institutions.
