Great British Scaleup: Armour Communications

If the US National Security Agency (NSA) can tap Angela Merkel’s secure mobile phone, nobody is safe – unless you have Great British Scale-up Armour Communications on board to stop your mobile calls, messages and file transfers being intercepted by the wrong people.

Founded in 2014 after a management buyout of Cellcrypt’s EMEA business, Armour currently serves a select number of government clients in the UK, Middle East and Australia which account for around 70% of its revenue.

The certification of its Armour Mobile encryption product against the secure real time communications certification standards of the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and NATO, plus the US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), was the key to winning those customers.

The next step is to expand the portfolio by developing encrypted mission critical push to talk (MCPTT) communications tools for standard smartphones aimed at police and emergency services. Those same tools could be embedded in customised communications applications for the financial services industry, strengthening secure customer communications by layering additional identification and authentication features on top. And by utilising its back end infrastructure, Armour also spies an opportunity to encrypt and authenticate desktop PC initiated email in the future.

Jointly owned and run by two senior executives – Dave Holman and Andy Lilly – Armour’s short term aim is to grow its headcount beyond the 24 staff now employed. And with a couple of multi-million pound contracts being finalised, it also needs to boost Armour Mobile’s automated provisioning and resilience capabilities to handle larger numbers of end users.

With the technology now proven against Secure Chorus standards and leapfrogging competitive enterprise and consumer solutions, Armour is now looking to drive further into other verticals with the help of channel partners in Europe, APAC and the US (one European reseller is already rebranding Armour Mobile for its own large customer base).

The company already has a foothold in the financial services industry (which accounts for the other 30% of its revenue), and we look forward to tracking Armour’s expansion beyond its core public sector market.

Posted by Martin Courtney at '07:41' - Tagged: communications   cyber   GreatBritishScaleup   encryption   ArmourCommunications