Announcement of Capital and Business Alliance between SHIFT SECURITY Inc. and SentryMark, Inc.

SHIFT Inc. (“SHIFT,” headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan; Masaru Tange, CEO and Representative Director) announced today that its group company, SHIFT SECURITY Inc. (“SHIFT SECURITY,” headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan; Shinichi Matsuno, CEO and Representative Director) has formed a capital and business alliance with SentryMark, Inc. (“SentryMark,” headquartered in San Jose, California; Albert Vasquez, Founder and CEO), entering into a share subscription agreement to purchase convertible preferred shares through a third party allotment and acquire an equity interest in SentryMark.

１．Reason for the capital and business alliance

Since its foundation in 2016, SHIFT SECURITY, a group company of SHIFT, develops a broad range of IT security services centered on vulnerability diagnosis and security monitoring services.

In the Japanese IT market, where companies often maintain the shortage of IT personnel, security personnel, including white hat hackers, are one of the most difficult ones to acquire through recruiting activities and training. On the other hand, recently, the schemes and techniques of cyber-attacks aiming at damage from information leaks, acquisition of confidential information and fraudulent acquisition of money are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the number of those attacks are growing at the same time.

Against this backdrop, SOCaaS* is attracting attention in order to strengthen measures against cyber-attacks, which is an urgent issue. When a security product is introduced to counter cyber attacks and all operations are implemented in-house, there will happen huge challenges such as to build a system, to secure personnel, and to mature knowledge about products. This eventually makes is difficult to reach a technological level that is necessary to protect against cyber attacks. It also increases demand for SOCaaS, which is noticeable in the security field, with the aim of improving security quality and reducing internal loads.

SHIFT SECURITY has provided vulnerability diagnosis services of “high quality,” “low price,” and “quick delivery” by thoroughly standardizing the skills of one of the leading white hat hackers in Japan. This has enabled us to recruit and train security personnel, who are difficult to acquire. Consequently, SHIFT SECURITY has fundamentally overcome the “shortage of personnel,” the greatest challenge facing the IT industry in Japan. At the same time, for the past five years, since its foundation, SHIFT SECURITY has built a solid supply system with more than 200 security personnel, achieved substantial growth every year, and thus, has made a significant contribution to maintaining and improving Japan’s IT security.

In this way, SHIFT SECURITY that are strong at stably securing security personnel has high affinity with SOCaaS which is surely one of the fastest-growing areas in SHIFT SECURITY. In addition, the rapid growth in cloud demand backgrounding the shift to remote work following the COVID-19 also spurs SHIFT SECURITY to strengthen SOCaaS. Since SHIFT SECURITY is one of a few Japanese companies that can provide SOCaaS with low price, it puts its much effort to grow SOCaaS rapidly to capture first-mover benefits.

SentryMark is the sole agency for the SOC infrastructure platform developed by SilverSky Inc (“SilverSky,” headquartered in Morrisville, North Caroline; Richard Dobrow, CEO), a major U.S. company in the SOC field, targeting the Asian region, particularly Japan. In order to grow at an accelerating pace in the rapidly growing marketplace, SentryMark is aiming to expand its business by strengthening sales activities for Japanese companies and enhancing recruitment activities. In addition, through the alliance, SentryMark will collaborate projects with SHIFT SECURITY and promote their SOCaaS business together in Japan.

SHIFT SECURITY will aim to provide a highly flexible SOCaaS business with “high quality” and “low price” through “standardization” and “structuring,” which are SHIFT SECURITY’s core strengths. With this enhanced service, SHIFT SECURITY will aim at providing it to wider variety of companies that could not have introduced SOC. While receiving orders for Japanese-language support from SentryMark, SHIFT SECURITY will generate more value by providing vulnerability assessments and other security businesses at the same time, depending on each customer’s situation. Due to its nature, services and products in the security field has extremely high recurring rate. With SOCaaS business, SHIFT SECURITY will further work on cultivating new/ existing customers and thereby, grow its business further.

*SOCaaS is an acronym of “Security Operations Center as a Service.” It monitors all devices and cloud environments 24 hours, 365 days to detect and analyze cyber attacks. SOC is the word for in-house system, SOCaaS is for outsourcing services.

For further information, please kindly refer to the document below.
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