Symantec Suite Tackles Risk Management

October 9, 2008: A trio of software updates to its information risk management products are on the way in early 2009 from Symantec.

Brightmail Gateway 8.0, is a new new messaging security platform. Formerly known as Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series, it introduces new sender reputation technology allowing organizations to protect their unstructured information such as email, instant messages and files more completely.

Brightmail Gateway offers Adaptive Reputation Management, that combines global reputation, self-learning local reputation and a new connection class management approach that prioritizes email from reputable senders while rejecting email from spammers. It is claimed to block up to 95 percent of spammers at the connection-level, giving more resources to reputable senders while starving spam connections.

This resource prioritisation uses local reputation that adapts to a customer’s specific sender environment and Symantec’s spam sender reputation database which is being increased by tenfold. This database leverages the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which collects data from more than 200 countries that is then analyzed by the 300 person Security Response team.

Brightmail Gateway leverages Symantec’s FastPass message processing approach to allow email from known good senders to bypass spam scanning entirely in order to improve scanner scalability and throughput. In addition, a new Bounce Attack Prevention feature signs outgoing messages in order to effectively eliminate an entire class of bounceback spam, an attack in which spammers place legitimate email addresses into a spam message’s forged ‘from’ header causing the email account holder to receive a flood of undeliverable messages.

Many organisations believe confidential information is most at risk from malicious acts when employees are mobile and not connected to the corporate network. To address this threat, Symantec Data Loss Prevention 9.0 will now prevent data loss from employees using laptops to send email, Webmail and instant messages while disconnected from the corporate network.

At the endpoint, Symantec Data Loss Prevention is designed to stop the copying or pasting of sensitive information and even prevents this data from being electronically printed or faxed. These new features add to Symantec’s existing controls that prevent sensitive data from being copied to USB devices and CD/DVD drives. Symantec’s expertise in content-aware detection, the ability to recognize specific content regardless of packaging, is also vital to successful endpoint DLP. With comprehensive coverage of endpoint DLP events, Symantec provides uninterrupted data loss prevention, regardless if employees are on or off the corporate network.

In addition to enhanced endpoint DLP protection, Symantec Data Loss Prevention 9.0 continues to advance its data discovery capabilities. Enterprise customers require two scanning modes for content discovery, the traditional mode where every file in a content repository is inspected for policy violations and a compliance mode where servers and repositories with compliance violations are quickly summarized. Symantec will provide both of these options in a single solution.

Enterprise Vault 8.0, the newest version of Symantec’s industry leading email and content archiving platform, is also due out in early 2009 with advancements to its data de-duplication and electronic discovery features.

In a Symantec survey conducted last month, storage and discovery savings top the list of IT concerns over managing unstructured information. More than half of the 202 IT managers surveyed said reducing storage costs across email, IM and collaborative content such as SharePoint files was either “important” or “extremely important” to their organization today.

With its optimised single instance storage, Enterprise Vault 8.0 keeps just one copy of individual emails or files regardless of the number of times it occurs or from what content source it originates.

Symantec is continuing its open beta for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices, with full support for mobile devices due to be be made available during the first half of 2009.

A Guided Review feature included as part of Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator, provides the ability to analyse and filter search results to quickly drill down to the most relevant content with a few simple clicks of the mouse, helping to further reduce the costs and risks of e-discovery.

Enterprise Vault now offers wizard-based configurations with default settings that are based on industry best practices letting administrators get Enterprise Vault up and running in minutes.

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