Remote access specialist LogMeIn has confirmed plans to hive off LastPass as a standalone cloud company.
Bill Wagner, president and CEO of US-based LogMeIn, indicated that LastPass, owned by LogMeIn for 13 years, has grown turnover by 50% a year for three years — placing it in a strong position, particularly in the business market.
“The substantial scale of LastPass, its tremendous growth, and its market leading position and brand makes it a perfect candidate to seize new opportunities as its own standalone company,” Wagner said in the company announcement.
As a standalone business, LastPass would invest more in customer experience, go- to-market functions and engineering to accelerate organic growth in password management, Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), according to the announcement.
Andrew Kowal, partner of major shareholder Francisco Partners, said: “The success we’ve seen across the entire LogMeIn portfolio over the last 18 months proves there is a vast growth opportunity ahead for both LastPass and LogMeIn.”
Increasing cyberthreat, fuelled by trends including the move to remote working, has spurred rising demand for better password management, according to LogMeIn.
Jay Bretzmann, cybersecurity products programme director at IDC, confirmed the market opportunity for LastPass’s SSO and passwordless MFA access software for cloud and legacy applications, VPNs and workstations.
“Organisations of all sizes across all verticals have applications that lack a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) or OpenID interface for SSO access, and their management is acutely aware of the financial costs and productivity burdens that come with repeated credential resets.”
LastPass in December announced an integration with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
Dan DeMichele, VP of product management at LogMeIn, said: “This ensures the keys used to unlock a user’s vault only reunite locally on the end-user’s device.”
Once an organisation integrates its directory with LastPass, users can access LastPass with their corporate Google Workspace credentials, without needing a different password.
Organisations can also provision employee LastPass accounts automatically through a one-time configuration, streamlining the addition and removal of users as well as providing users with simplified access.
LogMeIn’s range includes multiple remote access, support and connectivity applications such as GoToConnect, GoToMyPC, Rescue and GoToAssist.
( Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash )
