[This story has been updated for clarity since it first posted.]

We've been emphasizing data leak reviews lately, and with good reason. Sure, IDC expects the outbound content compliance market to grow to $1.9 billion by 2009. But we're really spotlighting this topic because of the ongoing business risk if enterprises don't take aggressive steps toward e-mail and other forms of electronic communications governance.

[ See the slideshow: Data-leak pluggers square off ]

This time around, I'm looking at four products: Code Green Networks Content Inspection Appliance 1500 (CI-1500); InBoxer; MessageGate Enterprise Email Governance 4.2.1; and Palisade PacketSure 5.5. All four scan for, and often block, known data exposures that would put your organization in violation of HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC regulations, and other legislation. Because smaller organizations (even nonprofits) aren't exempt from these various rules, Code Green Networks, InBoxer (which InfoWorld snagged for this exclusive review), and Palisade all ship as easy to set-up and use appliances.

These systems have gotten much better at discovering leaks of personal information and intellectual property. For example, my testing showed that advances in data fingerprint and analytics caught more security violations than early-generation products.

At the same time, vendors are targeting Rule 26 of the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Both InBoxer and the fourth product reviewed, from MessageGate, intelligently classify e-mails prior to archiving. IT executives and legal counsel please pay special attention: This feature helps locate e-mails sent and received by certain individuals that would be required to be disclosed on short notice as part of lawsuits.

None of these products (or any of the many others we've tested so far) will solve every insider threat problem. However, we point out where each fits best. With this strong lineup, there's no reason for delay in fulfilling your obligation to keep communications secure.

Code Green Networks CI-1500

Code Green Network's appliance targets organizations with up to 5,000 users; optionally, a low-end model handles 250 users, while a tricked-out server supports unlimited users. All provide enterprise-class content protection typical of large-scale software solutions -- without requiring technical skills to install and maintain the system. Setup simply involves plugging in the appliance at a network egress point and defining policies using a Web GUI (or loading a default policy set).

The CI-1500, like most data leak products, employs algorithms that look for patterns of identity numbers and other restricted content in outbound communications. But this solution differs from others in how it precisely identifies restricted content. Deep Content Fingerprinting registers up to 1TB of confidential content found in more than 390 formats and all languages; crawling works with file shares as well as content management system repositories from EMC Documentum and Stellent.

The middle-of-the-line appliance I tested (a late-model Dell PowerEdge server with dual Intel Xeon CPUs, 1.2TB of RAID-5 disk space, and 8GB RAM), executed an excellent performance -- from policy and incident management through content-stream inspection and policy enforcement.

Supplied policies cover all the main data privacy laws and help you comply with the content control provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley. Policies are based on reusable components, which I quickly adjusted (with simple tabbed dialogs) and combined to make new policies.

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