A disgruntled employee here, a careless one there, and just about any enterprise can find itself facing a mountain of trouble from confidential information made public. Help is at hand. Armed with increasingly sophisticated outbound-content monitors, information security officers finally have the weapons they need to conquer the threat of data leakage.

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Outbound-content monitoring - also known as data- or information-leakage prevention - came of age in the past year. The devices "have reached a state where they can be a fundamental part of everyone's network," says Josh Levine, managing director at Kita Capital Management, former CTO at E*Trade Financial and board member for device start-up Securify.

Scott Mackelprang, vice president of security and compliance for Digital Insight, an online banking services company in Calabasas, Calif. (now part of Intuit), agrees. And he's no pushover. "When I first saw technologies that were filtering at the perimeter to catch things on the wire, I was pretty skeptical, and I left them alone," he says. "For the longest time, I just watched the technology."

Then he discovered Tablus' Content Sentinel, which can find sensitive data even when the data is not moving but resting in odd and unexpected places, such as crummy old laptops and beat-up computers. He uses Content Sentinel plus Tablus Alert to look for sensitive data on desktops and as it moves across the network. Securing the network from the data's origination point - rather than from the firewall - is evolutionary, he says.

Maturing technology

Early outbound-content monitors typically focused on finding sensitive data from a single data source - for example, e-mail - as it was trying to cross the perimeter. But today's versions can scan just about any type of datastream, including Web traffic, e-mail, FTP, electronic faxes and instant messages. Some monitors also detect stored sensitive data squirreled away in Word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints - just about anywhere. In addition, they're much more linguistically sophisticated than earlier products, says Trent Henry, a senior Burton Group analyst.

Whitepapers

• Selecting Effective Virtual Directories
• A Modern Approach to On-Demand Email and Data Security
• Best Practices for HP Servers and HP Enterprise Virtual Array in a Microsoft Exchange
• Compliance, Protection, Recovery: A Layered Approach to Laptop Security
• Endpoint Security: Data Protection for IT, Freedom for Laptop Users
• IT Departments on Data Security: A Research Concepts Survey

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Webcasts

• Key Considerations for a Successful 802.11n Deployment
• Solutions to the Toughest IT Challenges in Remote Offices
• Lowering the Cost of Email Archives
• High Availability for SQL Server 2005 Using Array-Based Replication and Host-Based Mirroring Technologies
• Technical Overview of Exchange Server 2007 with HP Servers and Storage
• Bringing Order and Security to your Mobile Workforce: Corporate Mobility Policy and Device Management On-Demand

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Special Reports

• The Evolution of Network Security
• Taking Virtualization Up a Notch
• Learn how to Keep your Mobile Workforce Connected
• The self-managed network

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