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Computerworld - ... reaches nearly $14 million per incident. That's according to a study conducted by Ponemon Institute LLC for PGP Corp., a security software vendor in Palo Alto, Calif. Just another vendor-sponsored report slanted to back up breathless marketing claims? Perhaps. But Larry Ponemon, chairman of his namesake institute, got a firsthand look at 14 companies that made the news this year for losing customer data. Ponemon did individual audits to learn the direct costs borne by the affected companies (such as attorneys' fees and the cost of mailings and calls to affected customers), plus indirect expenses like lost productivity and opportunity costs (such as the long-term revenue hit from customers taking their business elsewhere). Andrew Krcik, PGP's marketing vice president, says he understands that people may quibble about the details of the indirect expenses, but he adds that the $69.8 million in direct costs paid by the 14 surveyed companies ought to be a wake-up call. As a marketer, Krcik thinks the most worrisome finding from the study was that the participating companies lost 2.6% of their customers on average after suffering data breaches. "Do you know how expensive it is to acquire new customers?" he asks. "A lot."

Jay Chaudhry, CEO of CipherTrust Inc.

Control scary protocols ...
... on your network via software running on an appliance. CipherTrust Inc. is releasing software called IronNet that runs on its IronMail appliance and is designed to manage HTTP, peer-to-peer and voice-over-IP protocols, says Jay Chaudhry, CEO of the Alpharetta, Ga.-based company. Now you can use CipherTrust's management console to define policies for e-mail and instant messaging plus services supported by the added protocols, Chaudhry says. IronNet costs $5,995 and is due early next year.
Restrict PC software to improve ...
... network security while lowering IT costs. According to Jeffrey Hibbard, vice president of marketing at Ardence Inc., the Waltham, Mass.-based company's On-Demand Software pushes software images to desktop PCs after end users log on. Hibbard says the images are based on profiles, so only authorized users can run applications. Across the pond in London, Steve Peskin, co-CEO of Propero Inc., similarly argues that managing PCs is often overly complex and always too costly. Propero sells software called WorkSpace Desktop Virtualization that centralizes applications on servers and virtualizes them on desktops. There are drawbacks to each vendor's approach. For example, Hibbard acknowledges the challenge of controlling applications on laptops, which can't boot software images when they're untethered from a network. And Peskin says that most of Microsoft Corp.'s software still needs