Symantec announces new products for its information risk management strategy 7 October, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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"Unstructured information is challenging to secure and manage but it is vital as it is the lifeblood of an organization," said Matthew Lodge, senior director of Symantec's product marketing, compliance and security management group.

Three new products make up Symantec's IRM strategy: Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0, Symantec Enterprise Vault 8.0 and Symantec Data Loss Prevention 9.0.

Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0, formerly known as Symantec Mail Security 8300, introduces new sender reputation technology allowing organizations to protect their unstructured information such as e-mail, instant messages and files more completely. New management features reduce risk and hands-on administration.

New features include adaptive reputation management that combines global reputation, self-learning local reputation and a new connection class management approach that prioritizes e-mail from reputable senders while rejecting e-mail from spammers. It enables Brightmail Gateway to block up to 95 per cent of spammers at the connection-level, giving more resources to reputable senders.

As well, Brightmail Gateway leverages Symantec's FastPass message processing approach that allows e-mail 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 e-mail addresses into a spam message's forged "from" header causing the e-mail account holder to receive a flood of undeliverable messages.

Version 8.0 of Brightmail Gateway has improved the speed of message audit log searches 50 fold to more quickly and accurately identify what happened to any particular message. In addition, Brightmail Gateway includes new wizards and default configurations to guide the installation process and implement best practices for deployment so that customers can deploy to production more quickly.

Lodge said that most of the new enhancements in Brightmail Gateway 8.0, such as making it easier to install and diagnose problems, were driven by partner feedback to help them more effectively support their customers.

The second product that is part of Symantec's IRM strategy is Symantec Enterprise Vault 8.0 New Features in Enterprise Vault 8.0 include advanced storage reduction that keeps just one copy of individual e-mails or files regardless of the number of times it occurs or from what content source it originates. As well, it works with geographically dispersed archives, said Lodge.

"This reduces the amount of storage required thus cutting server and storage capital and running costs," he added.

As well, Enterprise Vault now provide on-the-go search for Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. Full support for mobile devices will be made available during the first half of 2009. Enterprise Vault also provides seamless online and offline access to archived items from interfaces like Outlook, Notes or Windows Explorer so users perceive no separation between live and archived information.

In addition there is intuitive e-discovery with Guided Review that looks similar to the LiveMeeting Console. The Guided Review feature is part of Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator where users are able to analyze 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.

Data Loss Prevention 9.0 rounds out the products in Symantec's new IRM strategy.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) version 9.0 provides organizations with increased ability to discover monitor and protect confidential information wherever it is stored or used. Symantec provides companies with complete DLP coverage across endpoints and network and storage systems through a single, unified interface.

According to Jennifer Ellard, senior product marketing manager of Symantec's Vontu Data Loss Prevention, DLP 9.0 integrates with Altiris to simplify endpoint DLP agent management.

Key areas of innovation in the new version of Symantec Data Loss Prevention include broadened coverage of endpoint events, simplified endpoint DLP agent management and enhanced data discovery capabilities.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention 9.0 adds broader coverage for data loss events that begin at the endpoint. Symantec will now prevent data loss from employees using laptops to send e-mail, webmail and instant messages while disconnected from the corporate network.

Symantec Endpoint DLP also stops 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.

Another new feature is advanced data discovery capabilities such as two scanning modes for content discovery, which is 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 Data Loss Prevention 9.0 and Symantec Brightmail Gateway integration provides customers with the ability to inspect both inbound and outbound e-mail for malware, spam and data loss risks. Additionally, Symantec DLP 9.0 can also scan staged backups conducted from Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery.

For channel partners, DLP 9.0 gives them up-sell opportunities with C-level executives, who typically buy data loss solutions.

"We are seeing partners want to sell DLP because it is a hot space," said Ellard.

Symantec Enterprise Vault 8.0 is expected to be available in late 2008 and Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0 is scheduled to be available in early 2009 directly from Symantec or through Symantec's worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators.

In addition to new IRM products, Symantec also introduced Veritas Cluster Server One (VCS One), a new high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) platform for next generation data centers.

"We are transforming clustering and making it easier to deal with, easier to deploy, easier to upgrade and get it out of this heavy client footprint sitting on individual servers to something that is tightly coupled to the OS and tightly embedded in the kernel so it becomes lightweight and easy to scale," said Jason Nadeau, director of VCS product management with Symantec.

He added that there are three benefits to VCS One: reduced downtime, reduced capital expenditures and reduced operational expenditures.

VCS One enables IT managers to realize these benefits through active/active DR, multi-tier business application HA and scale-out control.

The active/active DR feature of VCS One combine virtualization control with policies for application priority to minimize capital expenditure by fully leveraging all available equipment at the DR site. VCS One ensures that the highest priority workloads remain available regardless of the outage scenario.

Multi-Tier HA minimizes total downtime by coordinating restart relationships between distributed application components running on various operating systems and across physical and virtual platforms.

The scale-out control feature of VCS One minimize operational expenditures and resolution time by enabling front-line operators to quickly and easily handle these tasks, error-free, without requiring assistance from backline operations or systems administration. VCS One also fully exploits live migration in virtualized environments to eliminate downtime where possible.

"HA/DR as a market opportunity is really a rich area [for partners] to wrap services around," said Nadeau.

Veritas Cluster Server One is available now with estimated pricing starting at $995 per CPU.