The acquisition of Swedish company Protect Data and its operating subsidiary Pointsec Mobile Technologies, a deal that closed in January, was a rare example of heavy hitter in edge security buying a player in core security. While the Scandinavian ISV protects data on endpoints such as desktops and laptops, cellphones, PDAs, and removable media, policy must reside in the network, with tools and technologies to allow data to pass through encrypted to the end device, said Nick Lowe, Check Point’s managing director for Northern Europe. This means a policy server must sit in the core, with integration into the corporate directory: Active Directory, eDirectory, or any other LDAP-compliant system.
Pointsec took Check Point into identity and access management, which is the essence of core security. The move would only have been upstaged had Symantec acquired RSA instead of EMC last year.
Pointsec’s Device Protector in its various flavors will merge with Check Point’s VPN client to become a more muscular Check Point Protector, and there will clearly continue to be a requirement for some form of Pointsec server, possibly integrated with some other Check Point technology, to reside in a corporate network. It is what Check Point intends to bundle with the server, and how it plans to interoperate with incumbent IDM systems in the enterprise, that it will be fleshing out in June.
