Gartner conference tackles security

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Security companies are gathering here this week for Gartner’s IT Security Summit to unveil products and services that promise to manage identities, prevent intrusions, track assets, protect data, and more.

The 12th annual summit, featuring speeches from Richard Goldberg of the U.S. Attorney’s office and political commentator James Carville, will attempt to not only detail the difficulties companies face in securing their networks, but also highlight technologies, methodologies, and services to help them, show organizers say.

The security problems facing enterprises today can actually be solved by current technology, says Chris Byrnes, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, who spoke at the summit Monday morning. “It’s definitely no longer a technology issue, the major problem is controlling them and making them meet business needs.” There are roughly 800 security companies selling products and services today, he adds.

Among the vendors making announcements during the summit are:

• Securify, with an updated version of its network security monitoring appliance. The company has added user identity features to track risky employee behavior regarding critical business information, officials say. Version 5.2 correlates network activity with user identities, which groups they belong to, and where they log on to the network, they say. Securify reports on potential risks in real time, unlike other risk management products that analyze data after the fact using logs, company officials say. This release also includes pre-built best-practice controls and can track user activity within Web-based applications. Securify Monitor 5.2, available now, starts at around $60,000.
• IPolicy, which is introducing a new model in its line of intrusion-detection firewall appliances. The iPolicy 6410, available now and priced starting at $59,995, is the newest member of iPolicy’s 6400 line of appliances that combine firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, and content filtering capabilities for corporate networks, company officials say. The latest model is designed for use with VoIP, video, and wireless applications, says officials, because it performs deep packet inspection on layers two to seven only once, allowing real-time security scanning without impacting performance. The 6410 lets organizations maintain network speeds of up to 1.2Gbps while blocking denial-of-service attacks, Trojans, and undesirable content, officials say.
• Code Green Networks, with the release of its Content Connectors that fingerprint content and metadata stored in enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Available now, Content Connectors work with ECM products from Stellent and EMC Documentum by scanning these products’ repositories and fingerprint data that the ECM systems have flagged as confidential, according to company officials. Code Green Networks’ Content Inspection Appliance, which scans traffic at the Internet gateway, then blocks any fingerprinted data from leaving the organization. Code Green Networks’ Deep Content Fingerprinting capability can fingerprint files stored in 390 different formats written in seven different languages. Code Green Network’s Content Inspection Appliance is priced starting at $75,000; the Content Connectors are options and pricing depends on configuration, the company says.
• CipherOptics, which has upgraded its security gateways and its CryptoView device and policy management tool. Enhancements to CipherOptics’ SG1002 and SG100 include integrated remote access authentication for distributed client access and stronger enforcement of passwords, according to company officials. CryptoView 2.0 adds security gateway configuration, policy population, and client access manageability tools to the software. CipherOptics’ SG1002 is priced at $30,000, the SG100 costs $9,800. CryptoView 2.0 is priced at $5,000.
• NitroSecurity, with the release of its NitroView Enterprise Security Manager. The software offers enterprises real-time flow monitoring capabilities and event and network-anomaly analysis features to help administrators better understand network and application usage, company officials say. The software takes in information from NitroSecurity’s NitroGuard intrusion-prevention system to analyze anomalies, events, and network flows, and delivers detailed analysis to network managers, officials say. NitroView for NitroGuard is available now for $9,995, capabilities to work with third-party IPS/IDS systems, firewalls, routers, and switches will be released as upgrades before year’s end, officials say.
• Counterpane Internet Security, which announced a set of new service-level agreements for its managed security service that relate to protecting customer data. One guarantees that new customers of its monitoring service can activate within five days, which is especially important to companies coming to Counterpane following an incident and need to be up and running quickly, say officials. The other guarantees 100 % availability of Counterpane’s security operations center, made possible by the provisioning of two hot centers for each customer, they say.