In our 2018 Trends in Information Security report, we outlined a concept we referred to as the ‘identity-aware perimeter.’ The essential idea is that as new architectures such as cloud, containers, mobility and IoT take hold, controlling access to resources will increasingly need to rely on identity as an alternative to purely network-based approaches focused more on ‘where’ you are than ‘who’ you are. By combining identity with user and entity behavior and risk scoring to gate access, Preempt fits squarely within this trend, which we think could be one of the most interesting and powerful to hit the infosec market in years.
Preempt has few direct competitors, and its initial challenge will be finding ways to distinguish itself from vendors in adjacent categories such as adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), advanced threat protection, user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and cloud access security brokers (CASB), to name a few.