The company has appointed Michael Warnock as country manager for cyber security in Australia and Tim Steele as channel manager for cyber security.

Both men are from Kordia's Sydney office.

New Zealand-based RedShield co-founder Andy Prow (below, right) told iTWire that the application was meant to protect Web apps like Internet banking systems, customer portals eGovt apps, eCommerce, booking systems and the like.

RedShield sits in front of the shielded apps and all traffic flows through the platform globally. Vulnerabilities in apps are recognised and protective shields are applied to stop attacks.

Prow said the application was shielding more internal/enterprise apps because businesses were realising that their corporate networks were becoming hostile. 

"Therefore they need to apply 'Internet security' to their internal apps, which is a massive job without something like RedShield," he added.

RedShield is also being used to shield SaaS apps, "because for many organisations they are moving to a SaaS and Cloud first approach. But it's hard to get SaaS vendors to develop unique features just for you. With RedShield in-path we can add security features beyond the SaaS provider's feature set".

While RedShield is not tied to any particular hardware or operating system, Prow said the company had a strategic partnership with F5 "as we love shielding on their hardware due to its speed and reliability".

He claimed that while there was competition from cloud Web-application firewall vendors, this was only at a basic level. "Imperva, Kona, CloudFlare, yes, but only at the basic protection level. Once an app gets complex and has deep security flaws, especially business logic flaws then WAFs run out of capability very fast. That's where we kick in," he added.

Prow said RedShield's competitors had no features which it did not. On the other hand, RedShield had attributes which, he claimed, were not matched by the competition.

"(The) ability for designer shielding. With no other WAF vendor can you give them penetration test findings full of real vulnerabilities and say 'please make these go away'," he said. "All WAF vendors will have certain items they fix but many will be untouchable and left for you to fix in code. 

"However recoding, upgrading and re-releasing an app can be slow and costly. We are the only option where we say 'give us all of your vulnerabilities and let us see how we can help'. Our goal is 100% remediation."

Kordia executive general manager of sales and marketing Craig Williams said RedShield had enjoyed great success in New Zealand and was looking to replicate it in Australia. 

“Our focus over the coming months is to build a strong channel of like-minded partners to help bring this innovative solution to Australian organisations. RedShield is fast gaining popularity amongst our customers with many of them telling us it is a vital part of their security fabric," Williams said.

“The strong growth RedShield has enjoyed in the past few years alone – both in New Zealand and around the world – is testament to just how great this service is and we look forward to bringing this innovative service to Australian businesses.”