IT Execs Scurry To Consolidate...

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