Enterprises are turning to e-discovery and intelligent archiving to prepare for scenarios where they might be ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce email records for litigation or compliance purposes.

Already well established in highly regulated sectors, technology to support instant legal discovery is becoming more relevant for any organisation with a high tolerance to law suits, the chief of email security, data leakage prevention and archiving software supplier Proofpoint Inc told us.

CEO Gary Steele said that e-discovery technology is no longer restricted to pharmaceuticals companies, healthcare sectors, or the domains of legal and financial services.

“Businesses in non-regulated industries are having to consider how to deal with the issue,” he said. “The technology has moved on significantly and businesses of all sizes see a high degree of comfort in the full and end-to-end security that’s now available for discovery archiving.” He added that the economics of the cloud has also helped lower the cost of entry. 

“It means data can be stored in a secure data centre, with all archived data can be encrypted. We can encrypt search strings with only the on-premise appliance holding the key,” he explained, outlining the company’s approach.

Proofpoint uses something called DoubleBlind Encryption technology, so that all data stored in the Proofpoint archive hosted datacentres is encrypted by a key held only by the customer.

DoubleBlind Encryption maintains data in encrypted form while still providing full search and discovery capabilities. When an authorised user conducts search and discovery through the appliance’s web-based user interface, returned email messages are decrypted via the appliance. Without the appliance, DoubleBlind encrypted messages remain indecipherable.

The archiving and e-discovery technology came to it when Proofpoint bought the Canadian e-discovery software house of Fortiva Inc around a year ago.

Today the company has a 3,000 strong client base across mid-sized organisations and large enterprise business sectors, Steele claimed.

The product line segments into four categories of inbound anti-virus threat management, policy-based outbound email data leakage protection, messaging encryption and archiving come e-discovery systems.

These can be deployed in an appliance, as software or cloud-based on-demand service, and as a combination of these.

The Proofpoint on Demand SaaS option for enterprise email security and compliance can be configured to provide inbound email protection, to defend against leaks of confidential information and to ensure compliance with data protection regulations such as HIPAA, GLBA and PCI standards – with or without policy-based encryption features.

Steele accepts that encryption adoption as a threat prevention tool has been relatively slow among enterprises, despite the publicity that has been generated around some very visible breaches.

The market is developing some momentum though, he noted. “Heightened sensitivity around customer data and awareness of privacy issues has seen organisations rapidly reassess their business requirements in the area.”

The technology has developed and is no longer as awkward to use or run, he suggested, saying that the user experience is now much better and the ease of maintenance of encryption systems has been much improved. “At one time the technology got in the way,” he said.

The company’s latest line of cloud-based email filtering service is sold as a first line of defence against spam and malicious email connections for users of any email security appliance, and which effectively reduces the volume of inbound email that needs be processed by on-premises gateways. 

It is deployed in front of the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway or any on-premises email security appliance from Cisco (IronPort), McAfee (Secure Computing/CipherTrust), Symantec, Trend Micro or Tumbleweed. The company has claimed that Proofpoint Shield’s connection management and load shedding features can reduce the volume of inbound email that needs to be filtered on premise by up to 90%.

The company shares email and URL reputation data with Blue Coat Systems so as to provide enhanced protection at the Internet gateway against spam, spyware, phishing attacks, malware, botnets and other email- and web-borne threats.