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Enterprises looking to safeguard intellectual property on corporate networks are looking beyond simple search appliances to an emerging breed of content analysis and monitoring tools designed to control sensitive business data.
Reconnex Inc., Vericept Corp. and Tablus Inc., part of a small group of companies that helped establish the market for enterprise content monitoring, are each readying new or updated offerings that demonstrate the maturation of the sector, according to experts.
Reconnex has rolled out its InSight platform, which has the iGuard content-analysis appliance and the iController content-registration server.
Customers deploying the Mountain View, Calif. companys system have two ways to register content they want protected. They can manually submit the content to the iController, or they can have the server send a crawler through specific file trees.
Any type of content, such as source code, large engineering files or simple Microsoft Word documents, can be protected.
Once content is registered with the server, the iController creates a digital fingerprint of each file in the platforms proprietary database. Copies of the fingerprints are sent to all the iGuards on the network, which then monitor traffic to keep protected files from leaving the network.
The iGuard appliances can identify more than 120 content types and are capable of identifying partial copies of protected files. Reconnex customers say that the InSight platform makes it possible to give users the freedom to use sensitive files without wondering whether theyre copying them or e-mailing them to competitors.
“Our source code is critical to us, and we needed another level of security,” said Shawn Farshchi, CIO and vice president of operations at WebEx Communications Inc. in San Jose, Calif., which has been using InSight since the fall. “We notified users that were monitoring, but they cant see it. The appliance architecture lets us do it without putting software on all 2,200 of our servers.”
Reconnexs InSight platform is available now for $70,000 for one iGuard and $85,000 for an iController.
Also available now is Version 7.1 of Vericepts Intelligent Protection Platform, which looks at both structured and unstructured data and uses an analysis engine to determine the context of communication that includes any protected content. The upgrade enables administrators to decide whom, what and when they want to monitor and also allows them to set priorities on each event.
In addition, Vericepts analysis engine has the ability to prevent new and unknown content from leaving the network. The platform also includes an investigation management capability through which customers can perform forensic analysis of events, along with auditing and reporting.
“The key for customers is they really need to be able to define what they want to control,” said Dwayne Desilvia, senior director of technology at Vericept, of Englewood, Colo. “And you need to monitor for the unknown—otherwise, you miss a lot of things.”
Tablus, in San Mateo, Calif., will announce this week that it will merge with Indigo Security LLC, a move that will enable the company to extend its Content Alarm solution to the desktop. Content Alarm uses a single appliance, but its operation is similar to InSights. The Tablus technology identifies sensitive content, and the appliance, installed at the edge of the network, monitors traffic for protected content.
The acquisition of Indigo, which sells an enterprise DRM (digital rights management) solution, will allow Tablus to keep a tighter rein on files at the desktop level, said Jim Pante, CEO of Tablus.
Indigo has a variety of solutions, including DesktopSentinel, Reporter and FileSafe, that prevent users from taking unwanted actions with sensitive content. All the offerings rely on a central client/server architecture that includes Indigo Secure Gateway, Indigo Client and Indigo Dashboard.
Through various controls, the system can prevent users from printing documents, burning data to CDs or modifying sensitive documents.
For example, FileSafe inspects all the data sent to a protected file server and encrypts all the files sent between clients and the server.
The new version of Content Alarm with the desktop capability will be available in the spring.
Analyze This
New content monitoring and analysis solutions
Reconnex InSight
- iGuard analysis appliance and iController registration server
- Proprietary file system for optimum speed
- Modules with preset policies for compliance
Vericept Intelligent Protection Platform
- Investigation management function
- Prioritization and assignment of individual events
- Analysis of known content