Following the Tablus announcement, Art Coviello, the president of RSA, and an executive vice president of RSA’s parent company EMC, was quoted as saying: the acquisition will help the company build out its security portfolio in the area of data protection in response to growing IT director concerns following high-profile leaks.
Certainly for RSA, the acquisition provides an opportunity to buy its way into what is rapidly becoming the security hotspot of the moment, while at the same time allowing the company to expand its protection portfolio beyond the core identity management and digital certification arena for which it is best known.
Tablus’s software is recognized for its ability to find and identify sensitive company data, and for preventing that data from being leaked from within the organization to outside agencies. Its solutions also manage data security through policy-driven controls that help with the requirement to align information protection with regulatory compliance requirements. Functionally, the Tablus content loss prevention suite enables organizations to locate, monitor, and protect sensitive information from loss or misuse. It deals with information discovery, monitoring, and then aligns this with policy enforcement, which is where compliance comes into the equation.
Data discovery is a critical early step in the end-to-end data-loss prevention battle, as it represents the start point for attempting to regain control over data content that is continually being distributed across corporate networks during the course of normal business activities. The Tablus solution provides the ability to not only identify original data, but also to track its flow while in transit, and when the data settles in repositories where, according to policy-based rules, it is not supposed to be.
This specialist expertise is what Tablus is able to provide, and from the RSA perspective it can be seen as a further step towards the levels of data intelligence protection that all organizations will eventually need as an absolute requirement to achieve proof-of-data-protection compliance. Going forward, it is intended that the new RSA acquisition will be merged with parent company EMC’s Infoscape information management offering, with a view to creating a common information management platform that will enable organizations to discover, classify, and make policy-based decisions on their business data.
Security, with its first-line data-loss prevention requirements, has clearly become an information management imperative. Most organizations, if they are being completely truthful, struggle to establish exactly what data they have, where it is being held, and how it is protected. The RSA acquisition of Tablus adds another serious player to the information management and data-loss prevention sector.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
