Aidan Simister, CEO of Lepide, courtesy photo.

Lepide announced Wednesday that it has selected Austin for the site of its new global headquarters.

The company, founded in 2005, also has offices in London and New Delhi and employs 236 people worldwide. It expects to have more than 50 people in its Austin office located at 600 Congress Avenue within the next 18 months, according to a news release.

The company chose Austin after it experienced a 76 percent rise in U.S. sales during the past year. The company makes IT security software products. Its software tracks changes in IT systems and monitors access and file permissions through a consolidated dashboard that provides critical oversight to files and folders in a network. The company caters to mid to large companies in the healthcare, insurance, finance, legal, education and government industries.

It also chose Austin for its talent, location and innovative entrepreneurial culture, according to a news release. And its growing cluster of tech companies that provide IT security services complementary to Lepide.

“We felt a real synergy between our ambitious growth plans and the Austin business culture,” Aidan Simister, CEO of Lepide, said in a news release. “We specifically wanted somewhere where there was a continuous flow of top IT talent coming from local universities like the University of Texas.”

And Austin’s central time zone location made it easy for Lepide to serve its growing base of U.S. clients, Simister said.

“The world becomes alarmed when a large data breach occurs at a large retailer or bank, as it rightly should,” Simister said. “But what’s rarely discussed is that much greater financial harm to companies and their customers actually occurs from within a company through problems like privilege abuse, poor visibility to file modifications and unchecked changes to permissions. Some of the very holes in an organization’s security ultimately exploited by nefarious hacking entities are themselves caused by poor oversight into insider IT activities.”

Lepide’s software and dashboard allow for constant monitoring of IT systems. Its customers include Moody’s, Bank of the West and the New York Mets.