The two products will ship as Enterprise Vault 2007 and the Mail Security Appliance 8300 at the end of June and July respectively. They will also ship as a new combination, to be called Information Foundation.
According to IDC’s numbers, Enterprise Vault has recently been blossoming in what was already a booming market for email archiving tools. EV revenue grew by 57% last year, giving Symantec the number one slot in the sector with a 23% market share.
EV 2007’s role as a leak-stopper will come via a new ability to look for sensitive data, by examining meta-data and email headers, and then applying the actions needed to secure that data.
Conceptually this is data classification, although unlike full-on ICM or IIM tools, EV classifies data without examining file or email contents. But EV has moved sensitive data to a repository, it will index its contents, Symantec said.
The contribution to the Chinese Wall from the MSA 8300 will be its ability to search outgoing emails for sensitive subsets of database records.
The current version of the MSA can only look for key words, or patterns of numbers such as social security numbers. The mechanism for the new function will be to export sensitive database records to a file, and point the MSA at that file to learn its contents.
Symantec is already beta testing software that will allow the MSA to filter HTTP web traffic, so closing the backdoor of web-based gmail or Hotmail. This feature will become GA during 2007, the company said.
Another way to walk data out is literally, on laptops, and thumb-drives or other USB devices. Symantec said it is working on this area of end-point control.
Electronic discovery or the searching of emails and files for evidence to be used in litigation is already a feature of EV. The new version of the archiving tool will add an API to allow it to hand-off data to third-party, specialist discovery tools. The first such product to exploit the API is from e-discovery software supplier Attenex.
EV will also gain the ability to log chains of custody for records, and allow PGP-encrypted mails to be read – presumably only with access to the encryption keys.
The expanded support for more types of messages comes via support in EV 2007 for emails sent from Lotus Domino. Exchange is obviously not the only fruit worth supporting.
Last year, Symantec bought instant messaging spam software specialist IMLogic, and that company’s software has been integrated into the MSA 8300.