Vendors build smart filters for mobile data loss prevention
We all know that employee-owned devices are seeping into the enterprise and that IT departments are on the hook to protect corporate data that might flow through them or get stored on them.
As noted earlier this week, recent research indicates that 91% of organizations with employee-owned devices allow users to run corporate e-mail on the devices, which renders them subject to various auditing, discovery and compliance rules. That means there’s a whole mobility management and security strategy begging to be put into place in enterprises. Doing so will require reviewing workflows and evaluating products of all shapes and sizes.
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In the meantime, there are emerging one-off solutions to at least handle the confidentiality aspect of corporate e-mail on user-owned devices. E-mail is probably the most common venue for mixing personal and corporate activity.
Content security company Websense, for example, last month announced a data loss prevention (DLP) capability aimed at mobile devices in a Microsoft Exchange messaging environment. Dubbed (fittingly enough) Websense Mobile DLP, the solution requires no client agent software or any extra software on the Exchange server.
Technology in the company’s Triton security gateway looks into the payload of e-mails and determines whether there’s likely to be confidential information in it, such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and intellectual property. There are 1,100 such filter factors in all, according to Dave Meizlik, Websense director of product marketing.
If the system discovers confidential info in the body of an e-mail or as an attachment headed for a noncorporate device, the system interrupts the service and quarantines the message. It sends the intended recipient, instead, a message explaining that the original e-mail message has been filtered and can only be accessed by a corporate-authorized device.
Meizlik says any mobile device using the Microsoft ActiveSync service can be filtered for confidential data, including Google Android, Apple iOS and Windows Phone 7 devices. E-mail can be filtered off BlackBerry devices, too, provided the organization runs a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, he says.
