Device gives companies a glimpse of ongoing privacy, intellectual property and financial disclosure violations.
Workshare this week is expected to announce a tool to help users get a handle on how much confidential and sensitive information is distributed inappropriately outside company boundaries.
The company’s Trace Enterprise Network is a risk-assessment appliance that sits at the edge of the network and monitors outbound e-mail and Web traffic. It’s preconfigured with basic content-security policies for protecting customer, financial and intellectual property information. Companies customize the policies to match corporate content security concerns.
Trace Enterprise Network is designed for short-term deployments. In conjunction with a Workshare professional services engagement, companies install the device for as long as two weeks to find vulnerabilities, such as hidden metadata, sensitive customer or financial information and profanity or discriminatory language, in outgoing messages and documents.
The appliance is the network complement to Workshare’s Trace Enterprise Client, which analyzes historical content sent out from and received by users’ PCs.
Together, the products bring attention to hidden information, such as metadata or comments embedded in documents, and visible content that shouldn’t be distributed according to business or regulatory policies, says Ken Rutsky, executive vice president of Workshare. A common gaffe the products find is employee comments accidentally retained in the notes of a sales proposal, Rutsky says.
“People understand that when they have 10,000 employees posting blogs, sending e-mails and doing all sorts of electronic communications, there is risk. But they don’t understand the extent of the risk,” he says.
Scores of companies have come under the spotlight when sensitive internal information is leaked. In March, Google unintentionally disclosed certain financial projections when slides from an online presentation contained speaker notes Google didn’t intend analysts to see.
With the risk assessment products, Workshare offers tools to prevent disclosures gaffes. Its Protect Enterprise Suite includes network and client products to alert users to risky content, block sensitive information leaving networks, and cleanse confidential content before it gets distributed.
Competitor SRS Technologies offers Document Detective, client software designed to find and strip hidden data and metadata including tracked changes, comments, embedded objects and object fragments.The vendor is working on a server-based version of the software.
Trace Enterprise Network is available as part of Workshare’s risk assessment services. Pricing for the services starts at $5,000.
