Mimecast Acquires Aware to Advance Collaboration Security

Mimecast purchased a startup founded by a longtime Nationwide leader to better address the risks associated with collaboration platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

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The Boston-area human risk management provider said its acquisition of Columbus, Ohio-based Aware will help Mimecast identify and mitigate compliance issues, insider threats and other risks in real time across communication channels beyond email. By leveraging Mimecast’s partner network, Aware can bring AI and national language processing technology to Continental Europe and the Asia-Pacific region (see: Human Risk and Email Security: New Mimecast CEO’s Vision).

“We’ve been following their progress and have always been fascinated,” Mimecast CEO Marc van Zadelhoff told Information Security Media Group. “They have the best AI team on the planet for picking up what’s happening in collaboration platforms from a sentiment and security compliance perspective. So we’ve been eyeing them for a while.”

Aware was founded in 2017, employs 65 people and in October 2021 completed a $60 million Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The company has been led since inception by Jeff Schumann, who spent nearly nine years at Nationwide, culminating in a role overseeing the insurance and financial services giant’s enterprise collaboration, social and technology marketing products.

How Internal Employee Communications Are Changing

Since van Zadelhoff joined Mimecast in January, the company has doubled down on addressing human risk within organizations, particularly the risk posed by employees making errors. The company bought Elevate Security in January to obtain a dashboard for identifying high-risk users, and it scooped up Code42 last month to expand its capabilities in managing insider risk and data security, van Zadelhoff said (see: Mimecast Appoints Marc van Zadelhoff as New CEO).

As communications increasingly shift from email to collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams and Zoom, Mimecast wanted to boost its ability to monitor and secure interactions on the platforms, van Zadelhoff said. Given that collaboration tools now account for 50% of internal employee communications, van Zadelhoff said a tool such as Aware can help with monitoring for sentiment, security and compliance risks.

“A lot of communication has shifted from only email to people using these other platforms, and we wanted to make sure we had a relevant footprint there,” van Zadelhoff said. “We have some capability in our existing portfolio, but these guys just take it to a whole new level with AI-power engines that can pick up sentiment of what people are saying, can pick up compliance, and then obviously security.”

Specifically, Aware’s AI and natural language processing capabilities are considered best in class for detecting sentiment and compliance issues within collaboration platforms, according to van Zadelhoff. Extending that expertise to boost Mimecast’s email security, archiving and business email compromise products will lead to improved sentiment analysis and compliance detection, he said.

“This natural language processing team is going to double down on those efforts and make our engines even more innovative across our heritage products and the Code42 products,” van Zadelhoff said. “What we have here is going to leverage NLP beyond the core Aware products to our whole portfolio.”

How Mimecast and Aware Will Come Together

The technical integration is expected to be relatively straightforward due to the modern, API-driven architectures of both Mimecast and Aware, Schumann told ISMG. The main challenge lies in training AI models to handle the differences between formal email messages and informal, short communication patterns on collaboration tools such as Teams and Slack, according to Schumann.

“It’ll take less than a month to train the models really effectively toward email, and then we’ll fine-tune those with customer feedback and product leadership feedback and be able to launch something to market that’s very compelling and industry-leading within a few quarters,” Schumann said.

Schumann said Aware’s AI models are trained on specific organizational communication patterns, enabling them to detect abnormal behaviors more accurately. This AI capability will now extend to Mimecast’s email security systems, which Schumann said will enhance overall security. With Mimecast, Schumann will lead the company’s AI initiatives and collaboration security and compliance portfolio.

Mimecast’s 42,000 customers and 6,000 partners are seen as a major advantage for scaling Aware’s technology, particularly in markets and segments that the company could not reach independently, Schumann said. The success of the acquisition will be measured not only by revenue and profitability but also by customer satisfaction metrics, such as net promoter score and customer retention rates.

“A CISO’s cyber program works with partners to lock down the infrastructure, application, data and identity security spaces,” van Zadelhoff said. “But this last building block of cyber is locking down human risk, where a lot of stuff hits the fan.”