Security vendors respond to heightened concerns

Last week, Palisade Systems released PacketSure 4.0, a content security appliance that identifies, reports, and blocks content that violates corporate security and compliance policies.

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"PacketSure helps organizations ensure compliance with the increasing number of legislative and industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and Sarbanes-Oxley," said Kurt Shedenhelm, president and CEO of Palisade.

"And perhaps just as importantly, from a reputation management perspective, PacketSure helps companies prevent breaches that would otherwise necessitate embarrassing public disclosures as mandated by California’s SB 1386 and other various state and national legislative disclosure initiatives," he said.

According to Shedenhelm, PacketSure identifies, reports, and blocks information leaks across over 130 network communication protocols.  "It's very difficult to cover all those protocols, but we offer a comprehensive, multi-protocol capability," he said.

The new release also monitors and eliminates the use of encrypted third-party e-mail applications, which may be used by employees to secretly send files.

Prices start at $15,000 per PacketSure 4.0 appliance for small companies and reach $40,000 per appliance for large enterprises.  Prices depend on the size of the company and the number of workstations.

While some security solutions are aiming at the broad expanse of IT systems, some are also offering more specialized versions of their products because some industries have more stringent security and compliance needs.

SenSage, for instance, this week announced it is teaming up with Cerner to offer P2Sentinel Enterprise, which uses SenSage security analytics software to aggregate, monitor, and investigate security events for healthcare organizations.

"The ability to identify and respond to threats and abuse affecting electronic patient healthcare information is critical in any organization’s efforts to protect patient privacy and achieve HIPAA compliance.  Detection demands a comprehensive analysis of audit data," said Bill Miller, vice president of technology for Cerner. 

P2Sentinel Enterprise is available now.