Zero Touch BYOD Firm Armor5 Takes in $2M

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Armor5, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based bring your own device (BYOD) management company, emerged from stealth today and announced that it raised $2 million in seed financing. Citrix Startup Accelerator, Nexus Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures participated in the funding round.

The tech startup takes a cloud-based, “zero touch” approach to managing mobile device access to business applications and data. The twist: An organization’s data “never actually resides on the end-users’ devices,” claims Armor5.

While it has become fashionable for cloud services providers to paint themselves as remedies for restrictive virtual private network (VPN) schemes, Armor5 embraces them. Armor5’s service connects to a company’s internal network via VPN and virtualizes data that resides in the intranet and along with cloud applications.

The firm’s slant on enterprise mobility sidesteps the bulk of the challenges facing the mobile device management (MDM) market, according to Armor5 CEO Suresh Balasubramanian.

“Our vision is to create a completely self-service, cloud-based answer to the security problems posed by today’s explosive growth in enterprise mobility. We solve immediate pain in the areas of mobility, network security and regulatory compliance. And we do so in a way that provides end-users immediate access to the apps, data and content they need from any device they’re using, without sacrificing data security,” said Balasubramanian in a company statement.

User can access internal company data and apps via a secure URL. There’s no software to download. The entire process, from sign-up to the moment users can access their resources takes only a few minutes, boasts the company.

“Zero touch means faster time to deployment, better security and compliance, improved mobile user productivity, and a substantially lower cost for BYOD security,” added Balasubramanian.

The platform also provides a degree of mobile content management and policy enforcement for compliance, auditing and reporting purposes. Armor5 provides dynamic watermarking and can be configured to deny the forwarding, printing and downloading of documents.

Citrix Startup Accelerator Senior Director and Chief Technologist Dr. Michael Harries, hints at the potential of a tech tie-up between his company and the startup.

“Armor5 has tremendous potential to complement Citrix technologies in addressing BYOD challenges. The service is ideal for CIOs who need an immediate solution to enterprise data security and compliance challenges with the growth of BYOD,” said Harries.

The Armor5 beta is available now.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.