Mr Marc Ling (left, with Mr Kirk Jon Khu): The Nio prevents undesirable applications from communicating over the network or to the Internet.

After years of network security R&D, specifically in network traffic analysis, network security company Niometrics is taking a new approach to help enterprises secure their networks by focusing on identifying and controlling all traffic within the organisation.

The company, which spun off from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) in 2009, identified application control as one of the most important components of a secure organisation.

“We saw that network managers had lost control of their network and wanted to give control back to them,” said Mr Kirk Jon Khu, Co-founder and Head of Operations, Niometrics.

The company’s flagship product is the Nio Policy Enforcer, an application control and policy enforcement solution. It addresses deficiencies in existing products such as traffic shapers and firewalls, in their ability to control the growing number of protocols and applications peddling traffic within enterprise networks.

“When you are in an office environment, devices such as PCs, laptops, and even employee-owned smartphones are connected to the enterprise network,” said Mr Marc Ling, Communications Director, Niometrics. “Many of these computing devices, and more importantly the applications installed on them now have free access to the corporate network, despite perimeter security in place. This is where the vulnerability arises, from the inside.”

What Nio Policy Enforcer does is to help organisations protect and manage their networks by flagging out the uncontrolled use of potentially high-risk applications such as peer-to-peer, remote backup, instant messaging, proxies, games, including malware and advanced persistent threats.

“We scan traffic, analyse it and present it to the company which will then have the discretion and power to block, or granularly shape the behaviour of applications, users and destinations,” added Mr Ling. “The Nio prevents undesirable applications from communicating over the network or to the Internet.”

Currently available as a hardware or virtual appliance, Niometrics says its product is updated regularly with additional detection signatures and new features such as IPv6 support. The company noted, for example, that its product is the only one in its class that can control specific features of Skype, such as allowing voice, or chat, while preventing encrypted file transfers. A cloud edition of its solution is also currently being test-bedded.

Niometrics’ customers include electronics manufacturer Venture Corporation, higher learning institutes and government agencies. Going forward, the company intends to expand its presence in the region.

“We are working with different ASEAN distributors, and our target market is any enterprise with up to 30,000 users,” said Mr Ling. “With our flexible and high-performance software design, we are able to quickly scale and launch new core features.”