November 17th, 2007
“Stemming the data loss” or “Woo-hoo-Vontu!”
Being the sad individual I am - I was so excited when we announced our acquisition of Vontu at the beginning of the month. My main responsibility at work is the Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series Appliances (rolls off the tongue doesn’t it). This product is the one which has had Vontu’s filtering engine built in for a good while now. I built a slide for a presentation a few months ago that talked about the four main technologies on the box:
- Brightmail - Top notch anti-spam filtering engine
- Anti-Virus Engine - Well known and loved (or hated)
- IMlogic - The core instant messaging security engine
- Vontu - Advanced filtering technology for Data Loss Prevention (or Protection depending on the day of the week)
These four elements are all integrated on the boxes and I joked whenever I showed it that three were Symantec technologies, though you’d be amazed how many people didn’t know, and the forth would probably be soon. I didn’t do so with any insider knowledge! Just knew that the technology was too good to stay integrated and yet outside the organisation for too long!
The team I’m in is a group of specialists called “Information Risk Management” and it will be very interesting to see if we get the European Vontu employees in with us at somepoint soon. From my experience so far of this area of business need is that it’s only getting more and more important as our organisations (and in fact our entire economies) are being built on growing stack of data. How it’s managed, for good or for bad, internally or externally, with ease or pain - all these are going to be critical. I repeat again - Woo-hoo-Vontu!