SearchInform opens a Kuala Lumpur office to court Malaysia's security channel

The insider-threat vendor is pitching PDPA-driven demand and a managed-service model to local integrators, but a strong launch turnout is not the same as signed partners.

SearchInform opened its first Malaysian office in Kuala Lumpur on July 3. The information security vendor drew more than 90 partners, customers and practitioners, and introduced a local partner program aimed at system integrators and managed security service providers, stating that over 20 companies left ready to begin pilot deployments.

Kuala Lumpur is the company's third Southeast Asian office this year, after Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta, which points to a deliberate regional push rather than a one-off market entry. The timing is not accidental given Malaysia's data protection regime turned materially stricter in 2025, when the Personal Data Protection (Amendment) Act 2024 took effect in phases through the year.

From June 1, both data controllers and processors must appoint a data protection officer, report breaches to the Commissioner within 72 hours, and face penalties that now reach RM1 million and up to three years' imprisonment for principle breaches. The amendment also scrapped the old whitelist for cross-border transfers in favor of an adequacy-and-assessment model.

Compliance stopped being a filing exercise and became an operational one, which is precisely the moment a data-loss-prevention vendor wants to walk into a room full of integrators. That backdrop explains the demand SearchInform is chasing. Its pitch centers on the insider problem: leaks, fraud and negligence originating inside the organization, the category that perimeter firewalls and endpoint antivirus were never designed to catch.

The portfolio spans a data loss prevention (DLP) system, a data-centric audit and protection (DCAP) tool called FileAuditor for classifying and tracking access to file data, a security information and event management (SIEM), and Risk Monitor for internal threat mitigation. The company has also added a Next-Gen DLP with an AI assistant.

Here’s where it differentiates from the incumbents. SearchInform folds employee-productivity monitoring into the same platform as data protection, and it leans heavily on a managed-service model in which its own analysts run the monitoring for clients who lack in-house security teams. In several export markets the company has stopped selling licences outright and sells the service instead.

Founder Lev Matveev framed the Kuala Lumpur office in those terms at the launch, saying the plan was to provide "not only advanced software, but also continuous support for partners and customers throughout the entire journey." The Malaysian roster is where a channel reader should look closely. Attendees named by the company include REDtone, CLL Systems, Cogniva, IT Essentials, iPlanet Solution, Mitracorp Resources, Wiki Labs and Cydentiq.

REDtone is the notable name: a Bursa Malaysia Main Market-listed integrator, a Berjaya Corporation subsidiary, and a heavy supplier to government agencies that already runs its own SOC and sells DPO-as-a-Service against the very PDPA obligations SearchInform is citing. IT Essentials CEO Yap Ming Sern supplied the launch endorsement, saying the platform "bridges workforce productivity monitoring and deep data protection, which is precisely what modern enterprises need," and tying the demand to the PDPA amendments and what he called the rise of digital workforce vulnerabilities.

Worth keeping in perspective: showing up to a grand opening is not the same as signing a distribution agreement, and the "20-plus companies ready to pilot" figure is the vendor's own. Pilots are cheap to start and easy to walk away from. The partner economics, margin structure, deal registration, and who owns the client relationship in a managed-service model, are the details that will decide whether this roster converts.

SearchInform itself is less familiar to the Malaysian channel than the incumbents it will be sold against. The company was founded by Lev Matveev in the mid-1990s and built its business in Russia before expanding abroad, with its headquarters now in Dubai.

SearchInform data shows it serves more than 4,000 customers across over 20 countries. The managed-service model raises a practical question for any foreign vendor selling outsourced security into Malaysia. A DLP and DCAP deployment is granted deep visibility into a client's data flows and its staff activity, and where the monitoring is outsourced, the analysts watching that data may sit outside the client organization.

Since June the amended PDPA has required a transfer impact assessment when personal data leaves the country, which makes where those analysts are based and where client data is processed a detail integrators will want pinned down before they put their name on a proposal. Deployments kept on-premise and run by a local partner narrow that exposure.

It is a question of deployment architecture, and the sort of thing that separates a signed managed-service contract from a pilot that stalls. SearchInform is also not entering an empty field. Malaysian enterprises already buy DLP from established names such as Forcepoint and Microsoft's Purview, with DCAP specialists like Varonis and a deep bench of local SOC providers competing for the managed-service budget.

SearchInform's counter is price, the productivity-monitoring angle, and a service model that suits mid-market firms without a security team of their own. That is a real gap in the Malaysian market, and it is a sensible one to aim at.

The pipeline SearchInform described, more than 20 firms weighing pilots, is the right thing to watch and also the easy part. Whether the partner programm converts will hinge on the economics and on whether integrators can build a delivery practice around a brand most of their customers are meeting for the first time.