Reconnex this week announced an upgrade to its data-leak prevention software and appliance designed to help companies define and protect their intellectual property.
Reconnex iGuard 7.0 includes the company's Content Analytics Engine that evaluates data stored in the iGuard Capture database to determine its nature and set policies regarding who should have access to it, says Faizel Lakhani, vice president of marketing.
While data-leak protection products have long been able to recognize and protect personally identifiable information, such as credit card numbers and Social Security numbers because they adhere to a standard format, intellectual property is much more difficult to flag, Lakhanim says.
"With tradition data-loss prevention, you tell it what to look for and it finds it. What we're doing with 7.0 is creating a set of applications that allow organizations to answer questions like 'What information is sensitive?' and 'Who should be able to access that information,?" he says. For data access, the software helps determine who inside the company and which third-party partners should be allowed to view sensitive data, he says.
The new applications included in Version 7.0 include search, which helps administrators understand the actions that led up to a policy violation to help prevent future violations; rule tuning, so that administrators can test out their rules on previously captured data to make sure they are effective before deployment; data mining, to recognize patterns and anomalies in data access and usage; and policy builder to help organizations understand relationships among data to set better policies, he says.
The new tools in Version 7.0 also help organizations correlate current events with past ones, detect risk trends and identify threats beyond those already defined by the organization,Lakhani says. The new version also includes a revamped interface that gives different departments in a company, such as legal or human resources, tools to build their own policies.
Reconnex iGuard 7.0 starts at US$35,000.