The Cupertino, California-based company has retained both the name of the Provilla product, called LeakProof, and its release number, the latest being version 3.0. It is a client-based product to sit on lap- and desktop machines, designed to guard against loss of intellectual property and sensitive information via email, USB or other mobile devices.
The major enhancements in the new release, said Glen Kosaka, director of marketing from the DP business unit at Trend are education, USB encryption and justification. The first of these came in response to customer’s requests for something more than the pop-up alerts that had hitherto been shown when someone was detected trying to export some form of sensitive data.
Research shows that between 80% and 90% of data leakage is accidental, so companies asked us for a message saying ‘Click here to go to the HR intranet to read up on policy’, he explained. As a client-based technology, we’re ideally placed to deliver such functionality.
The encryption feature is the inclusion in the pop-up message of the alert that the information to be written to USB must be encryption, together with the demand that a user input a password prior to carrying out that write. We’ve only done it for USB initially because most companies have already got gateway devices in place to enforce email encryption, Kosaka went on.
Finally there is justification, where someone who is being told they must encrypt anything they write to a USB can override that requirement and still write in clear text if they have the authorization to do so.
It might be an exec copying something to show to a key business partner, Kosaka explained. In this case the IT admin can include an override button which they can hit, after which they’ll get a pop-up message requiring a justification to be typed in for sending to a management server.
LeakProof is not alone in sitting on the endpoint rather than at the gateway, but most of the other offerings in the market are add-ons from companies that originally started out with gateway-only offerings, and as such are less mature products, said the exec. Vontu [now Symantec] opted to develop its own and launched it earlier this year, he began. Tablus [now part of EMC/RSA] bought a small company called Indigo Security in 2005 get client-based technology; Vericept developed its own endpoint capability; Onigma [acquired last year by McAfee] was always a client-based solution, and PortAuthority [now Websense] partnered with Safend for such technology.
Provilla had also struck a partnership with a gateway DLP vendor, namely Reconnex, announced in April, and though its own very small customer base is entirely client-based, Kosaka said Reconnex is already engaging with a number of its customers who want an endpoint product too, and the two companies are also participating jointly ini RFPs that ask for both types of technology.
LeakProof is licensed per client, with a separate fee for the management server. Prices typically range from $55 per client per annum for small deployments, down to $20 for large ones, in both cases including the management server. There is also a perpetual license alternative, said Kosaka.
