IT Execs Scurry To Consolidate...

May 2, 2005 (Computerworld)

Anne Bonaparte, CEO of MailFrontier Inc.

...tools for securing e-mail -- and possibly their spyware defenses, too. Those are the insights that Anne Bonaparte gleaned from a survey of 200 IT executives that was conducted for her company in March by InsightExpress LLC in Stamford, Conn. Bonaparte, CEO of MailFrontier Inc., an e-mail security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., says that the users who were polled didn't know her company was involved and that none were MailFrontier customers. In the survey, 62% of the respondents said they plan to consolidate e-mail security functions, such as antivirus, antispam and content-filtering capabilities, into a single product. And they'll do it fast: 96% of those consolidating said they'll do so in the next 12 months. Why the rush? Bonaparte says it's because of "the rising complexity inside the corporate network's DMZ." She notes that too many point products performing discrete tasks with unique management consoles have resulted in IT staffers at 47% of the surveyed companies spending two or more hours per week fiddling with e-mail security duties. Meanwhile, half of those surveyed said that the time spent on such tasks should be less than a half hour each week. The consolidation trend could also hit antispyware vendors as IT execs look for a consolidated view of all the tools used to protect end-user systems, Bonaparte says.

Sarah Daniels, Aventail's vice president of marketing and product management

SSL VPN borrows IPsec's tunneling...
...approach to support end-user access to all applications. Aventail Corp. in Seattle this month will release Version 8.5 of the Smart SSL VPN software for its EX-1500 security appliance. The software's new Smart Tunneling feature lets IT administrators set access policies so end-user machines can tunnel into a corporate network the same way IPsec technology does -- at the network layer, which is the third level in the seven-layer protocol stack used in IP networks. According to Sarah Daniels, Aventail's vice president of marketing and product management, traditional virtual private networks based on the Secure Sockets Layer protocol work strictly at the higher layers of the network stack. That gives admins more control over access rights but founders when dealing with streaming media and other applications that work fine over IPsec, she says. Version 8.5 also improves support for Linux and Macintosh clients. Pricing starts at $6,995.

Aventail's EX-1500 security appliance

Automate management of end users'...
...accounts with new admin tools. The Avatier Identity Management Server (AIMS) suite, due to become available this week from Avatier Corp. in San Ramon, Calif., includes programs designed to help automate the creation and management of end-user accounts. The software uses data from existing directories to create and terminate accounts. One program, Password Station, automates end-user retrieval of forgotten passwords, taking the burden off of help desk staff. Another tool, Password Bouncer, helps end users create strong passwords. Avatier CEO Nelson Cicchitto says AIMS will also automatically compress and archive the e-mail files, home directories and user profiles of terminated workers to help companies comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements. The software costs $5 per end user.
Endless indexing is now a breeze...
...with search app upgrade. Bethesda, Md.-based dtSearch Corp. this week is shipping Version 7 of its eponymous full-text search application for desktops, servers and media such as CD-ROMs. The big thing in dtSearch 7 is, well, bigness, says David Thede, dtSearch's president. Previous versions could handle 4GB to 8GB per index, meaning that multiple indexes were needed for large data sources, which slowed retrieval times. Thede says the new release can handle a whopping 1TB of indexed data. Pricing starts at $199.
VoIP planners need to consider...
...latency in the design and implementation process. But you knew that, of course, and you also knew about the little matter of voice-over-IP security. Well, according to Bryan Cohen, a senior sales engineer at CDW Corp. in Vernon Hills, Ill., both problems might just disappear if your service provider offers Multiprotocol Label Switching technology. With MPLS, you get a secure circuit for your VoIP packets and a guaranteed maximum packet latency to ensure that calls don't get garbled, Cohen says. He adds that MPLS is ideal for companies using VoIP to connect their far-flung corporate voice networks. In the future, when service providers can bridge MPLS circuits among themselves, calling between companies will also benefit. But that's a few years off.