The usual corporate-PowerPoint-hell exists at Symantec with 50 slide monsters containing everything you ever wanted say written on the slide itself. I apologise if you’ve ever been subjected to one of ours! Personally I try and use whiteboard wherever possible and I’ve been re-thinking the one I usually give recently in the light of our Vontu acquisition.

Vontu as a standalone entity focused on data loss prevention (DLP .. Another fab TLA) which is fundamentally about discovering where your important data exists within your organisation and keeping in the hands of only the people that need it. I think as I’ve been reviewing their messages and slides that the thing that most jumped out at me was the fact that “policy” was the core of all they do. Describe data. Describe access. Describe retention. Discover. Protect and prevent leakage. All those kinds of words and phrases revolve around policies. If you don’t know what your policy is handed down from a legal body, or an internal body, then how on earth are you going to decide how long to keep that pile of emails from your customers?

I think the biggest relief for me though as I discover more about the Vontu technology is that it’s not some toothless auditing or reporting tool but can actually impact and change user behaviour. You can run it in “Monitor/Discover” mode or “Prevent” or both. It’s not hard to build stories when you can impact the behaviour of thousands or millions of interactions of individuals using “our” information within an organisation!

• 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!