Vontu, whose product line is designed to prevent leakage of sensitive data by monitoring corporate networks, says it's now developing software that will look into corporate desktops and servers to find inappropriately stored data.

The software, called Discover, is scheduled to ship next quarter as part of the Vontu 5.0 suite. It will use "crawling" technology to go into targeted file servers and personal computers to look for confidential data that shouldn't be there, says Steve Roop, vice president of marketing. Industry analysts say such searching capabilities are new to the nascent data-leakage prevention market, as IDC dubs it, but are already being used in corporate content-management systems.

Vontu's direct data-monitoring competitors, including Tablus, PortAuthority Technologies and Reconnex, don't have products that crawl into servers and desktops, but there are parallels to products from StoredIQ (formerly Deepfile) and BlackBall, says Scott Crawford, senior analyst with Enterprise Management Associates, in Boulder, Colo.

"There are products that crawl into computers for legitimate reasons to find data for purposes of policy control," Crawford says. "This is where Vontu is starting to overlap into another area of enterprise management ."

There are corporations that design their own crawling applications, says Jim Hurley, vice president of research at Aberdeen Group.

Both analysts say that regulations, including the statewide California Database Security Breach Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act for financial services firms and HIPAA, are factors driving corporations to beef up efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data. This year, several corporations, including Bank of America and Wachovia, disclosed massive data leaks, affecting tens of thousands of customers.

Vontu's Discover software, designed to run on a Windows or Linux server, will locate confidential data at rest anywhere on corporate servers and laptops after being granted access, Roop says.

If Discover identifies unauthorized storage of sensitive data, it creates an incident report for review and action by administrative personnel. Discover will work with the same technology used in the company's other products, Vontu Monitor for monitoring data transmissions and Vontu Protect for blocking outbound e-mail with unauthorized content.