The rise of the remote workforce has been a boon for cybercriminals, with employees accessing sensitive work systems from unsecured home offices and mobile devices. Early in 2020, the FBI’s Cyber Division was already reporting a 400% increase in attacks since the start of the pandemic.

“Our real focus is ensuring that every company and every individual on their network, outside their firewall, inside their firewall, on any device is secure,” said Jim Schaper (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Ivanti Inc.

Schaper and Nayaki Nayyar (pictured, left), executive vice president and chief product officer of Ivanti, spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation about Ivanti’s recent acquisitions in the mobile security and enterprise security space. (* Disclosure below.)

Ivanti acquisitions add unified endpoint management and zero-trust security to the company’s service management chops

Seeing an opportunity to improve its market services and build business through strategic acquisitions, Ivanti started discussions with unified endpoint management provider MobileIron Inc. right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It was fortunate timing.

“We had a great level of expertise inside the pre-acquisition Ivanti to be able to secure the endpoints at the desktop level. But we struggled a bit with having all of the capabilities that we needed to manage mobile devices and tablets and anything that is attached to the network,” Schaper explained.

Alongside MobileIron, Ivanti acquired Pulse Secure LLC, which brought its expertise in end-to-end zero-trust secure access solutions. Zero trust means validating and certifying everything a user accesses, from network to mobile devices to applications and data, Nayyar explained.

“We were primarily a patch management vendor in the security space, but now we truly extend beyond that patch to this end-to-end access all the way from cloud to edge,” she said.

Ivanti chose MobileIron and Pulse for different reasons, but they were “all very consistent with our long-term strategy of securing the endpoints on every network, in every location around the world,” Schaper stated.

Combining Ivanti’s service management expertise with MobileIron’s UEM portfolio and Pulse Secure’s zero-trust security stance is a “ convergence of positive three pillars,” according to Nayyar. “[This is] where we truly differentiate and compete and win,” she said. “There is no other vendor in the market that has that holistic offering.”

Next up for Ivanti is entering the internet of things world, starting with a January release of solutions for managing and securing healthcare solutions. “So, stay tuned!” Nayyar concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Ivanti Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither Ivanti nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE