ABOUT US

PKWARE: Data Security Experts

PKWARE has been securing sensitive data for over 40 years. We’ve earned the trust of 21 of the 25 largest banks in the U.S. Our team delivers modern, data-centric security solutions organizations can rely on.

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Trusted By Leading Organizations for Over 40 Years

Our Mission

To provide simple, compliant, and robust data security that empowers companies to securely use their data.

Our Technology

Our data security platform removes security and compliance complexity. We help customers eliminate data security gaps, automate the management and protection of sensitive information, and simplify regulatory compliance—all with the ability to tailor the solutions to your unique needs.

PKWARE enables organizations to take control of data security. Our solutions enable comprehensive visibility and protection of sensitive data across your entire enterprise.

With our platform in place, you can focus on strengthening your security posture, streamlining processes, and reducing costs.

Our Values

Integrity

We do what we say we’re going to do.

Discipline

We hold ourselves accountable.

Autonomy

We empower everyone to achieve results.

Passion

We uphold our mission despite challenges.

Sense of Urgency

We don’t wait for someone to ask; we get the job done.

PKWARE’s History

1986

Our story began over 40 years ago when Phil Katz founded the company in Milwaukee. His programming skills, imagination, and expertise led to early programs for data compression and sharing.

The company released PKZIP, a file archiving program that introduced the ZIP file format. It was the original compression technology, which is still in prevalent use today. Every time you zip a file, that’s thanks to Katz.

1989

“PKWARE is the backbone of our data protection strategy. With agents across all endpoints, we seamlessly encrypt and decrypt files while managing petabytes of data. For over 5 years, PKWARE has helped us meet audit requirements with confidence and trust.”

Adam Coelho, Cyber Security Director, Fiserv 

1990s

We continued to enhance PKZIP to increase its value with new capabilities for managing, protecting, and sharing data. Next, we began to focus on enterprise data protection in 1991, developing products to integrate data discovery. After all, you must first know where sensitive data is to protect it. By the end of the decade, 90% of Fortune 100 companies were using our technology.

PKWARE acquired Ascent Solutions, a mainframe software based on PKZIP. This allowed enterprise computing programs to leverage our technology.

2002

2004

PKWARE launched SecureZIP, an enterprise data security product with certificate-based encryption. Since then, we’ve updated the product many times, adding secure data exchange, DLP enhancements, and versions for iOS and Android.

PKWARE released cloud-based discovery and protection to meet all the security and compliance requirements of this environment.

2007

2016

PKWARE evolved further, creating a comprehensive solution for enterprise-wide data protection. We added a centralized management console, data discovery capabilities, and modern Smartkey encryption key management technology.

PKWARE added intelligent data discovery capabilities, allowing organizations to detect sensitive data in files and apply automated, rule-based remediation.

2017

2020

PKWARE acquired Dataguise, a leader in personal data discovery and protection. With the combined features and solutions, PKWARE rebrands its comprehensive platform as PK Protect, with data security for every environment.

As the security landscape began to take sight at mainframe data, the company introduced PK Protect for z/OS. As an IBM Partner Plus member, we used our expertise to solve the complex security challenges in this environment.

2021

Today

From compression to encryption to complete data protection, we’ve got you covered. Businesses use our solutions for endpoints, servers, databases, data lakes, the cloud, and mainframe. In one platform you can locate all sensitive information and apply the best possible protection. Current product enhancements include integrating AI further into our solutions to drive additional efficiency and accuracy.