Liquid Machines aims to secure apps and their data

About six months ago, I was contacted by a company with news of a fascinating new product. I’ve looked at this company’s Web site and am very interested indeed in what it has to offer.

Liquid Machines is offering a mechanism for automatically integrating security with any application program that you use in your organization, whether custom-built or commercial off-the-shelf software.

The software, also called Liquid Machines, uses security agents that travel with data and documents to enforce security policies, the company says. The agents allow access to the data in accordance with a user’s privileges.

The software allows users to create security policies through desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office, Visio, Microsoft Project, Documentum’s eRoom, SolidWorks and Adobe Acrobat.

According to the documentation on the Web site, the product allows users to create and share documents just as they ordinarily would – but these documents are restricted by access and usage control rules that can be defined by managers centrally and managed inside and outside the enterprise, or assigned by the users themselves.

Once documents have been created in the modified applications, they cannot be shared by versions of the software that have not been transformed by Liquid Machines. This design should greatly reduce one of the most pernicious problems in modern data management: data leakage. Unlike plain encryption tools or those based on a repository or container implementation, which generally cause resistance from users and have no access-control features, the design of Liquid Machines could significantly improve overall security in the corporate sector.

The product is licensed for workgroup applications, starts at a base price of $50,000, and has a per-seat incremental pricing structure.

[Disclaimers: I have not tried this software. This is not an evaluation or an endorsement – it’s a statement of interest. I have no financial involvement whatsoever in the company and it products.]