If you’re concerned about sensitive data leaving your small business, it’s time to pay attention. Code Green Networks Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif, has announced what’s known as a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) appliance. Designed for companies with 50-250 employees, the CI-750 helps keep a lid on data leaks.
“The CI-750 resides at an organization’s Internet gateway, delivering enterprise-class data protection to offices with as many as 250 network users for one-third the cost of other data loss prevention products,” said Sreekanth Ravi, founder and CEO of Code Green Networks. “The reality is that small businesses share the same risks and are bound by the same requirements and regulations as any other enterprise.”
Such businesses, he said, face identical challenges as larger organizations in terms of protecting confidential data and safeguarding intellectual property — including having to comply with the same Federal and state regulations and guidelines as organizations with more resources at their disposal. This is especially true with new guidelines set forth by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for protecting personal information and recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) regarding the protection of electronic communications for e-Discovery purposes.
Unlike their large enterprise counterparts, small businesses typically don’t have in-house security experts or compliance officers advising them on what they should do to secure their data. As a result, they aren’t quite in step with their larger industry counterparts when it comes to deploying technology and instituting and enforcing data protection policies.
Accordingly, the CI-750 is priced for the SMB market at $10,000. The appliance form factor makes it easier to deploy and manage than enterprise-class products on the market. Wizards guide the administrator through the policy setup so the average business owner can independently create his or her own polices and safeguards to ensure compliance with strict government requirements.
For example, the appliance includes pre-built policy templates. Rather than putting the onus on business owners to understand these regulations and tailor their policies to monitor for certain security infractions and specific data privacy violations, Code Green has embedded this intelligence into various templates.
The CI-750 produces out-of-the-box reports for audit purposes. Integrated on-board e-mail encryption enables organizations to set policies that automatically encrypt authorized data transmissions leaving the organization. When the appliance detects an authorized e-mail containing personal data or other content, it encrypts the message to ensure its security through to the recipient. A log entry is then automatically generated providing an audit trail record for compliance purposes.
The CI-750 scales up to 250 people. Code Green also provides a mid-sized business appliance that scales up to 5,000 employees called the CI-1500. Within a day, Ravi said, the appliance can be up and running.
Once the policies have been created, the CI-750 begins monitoring content flows on the network, automatically enforcing data protection policies based on a host of configurable settings to log, alert, retain, block, encrypt or re-route transmissions across all popular Internet communications channels – E-mail (SMTP), Web (HTTP / HTTPS), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and online tools such as Blogs and Wikis. The CI-750 also works across WebMail services including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail, AOL Mail, Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail.
“The CI-750 maximizes throughput, adding no latency to TCP traffic while ensuring protection for up to 20 million elements of data stored databases and structured files, and up to 250 Gigabytes (GB) of data,” said Ravi. “It operates across more than 400 different file formats including Microsoft Office documents, software source code, CAD drawings, image files, rich media and industry-specific application formats.”
The CI-750 also helps organizations prepare for legal discovery requirements by enabling WebMail communications to be monitored for sensitive content, recorded for auditing and discovery purposes, or completely blocked. For this purpose, the CI-750 works in conjunction with any proxy server, which helps filter the outgoing traffic.
Ravi’s intention is to shift the pricing dynamics of the DLP market. He said that he earlier successfully commoditized the firewall market using appliances, and now Code Green is on a similar path with a family of plug-and-play DLP appliances. His goal is to make content security more accessible and more affordable to companies of all sizes.
“The CI-750 breaks the price/performance barrier by entering the market as the first small business DLP solution priced at $10,000,” said Ravi. “The market for DLP is being driven by the intersection of two things: the availability of solutions like the CI-750 which make DLP more affordable and easier to deploy, and increased regulatory requirements that now affect companies of all sizes. Both of these factors are accelerating the adoption of this market.”
Adapted from Enterpriseitplanet.com.
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