The company says that IronNet is the first real-time, multi-protocol, multi-technology compliance solution that enforces common corporate policies across a number of protocols including e-mail, instant messaging, Webmail, peer-to-peer, and other FTP- and HTTP-based activity.  It was designed to improve productivity, reduce liability related to the exchange of offensive content, aide compliance with government enforced regulations, and prevent loss of intellectual property through data leaks.

“CipherTrust was founded on the principles of security and policy enforcement, enabling organizations to control the policies that impact their inbound and outbound messaging needs,” notes Jay Chaudhry, CipherTrust CEO, chairman and founder. “As communication boundaries expand and other areas of the business outside of messaging are impacted, IronNet leverages CipherTrust’s award-winning policy engine and extends that control to reduce risks associated security breaches and confidential data leakage across all areas of exposure.”

Personal Webmail, blogs, file transfers and other communication mediums present opportunities for confidential information leakage, compromising corporate integrity and creating compliance violations. Instead of only blocking outbound messages or alert managers when a violation occurs, CipherTrust enables administrators to incorporate unified policies across all messaging protocols and apply multiple enforcement options—including block, quarantine, and alert or encrypt. IronNet correlates multiple detection techniques to reduce false positives and enables various areas of an organization’s business—including audit/legal/risk, security, messaging and IT operations—to enforce common policies and significantly reduce the financial, legal, regulatory, and corporate reputation credibility risks associated with sensitive data leakage.

“Effective multi-protocol solutions must evolve from monitoring and reporting on data leakage to actually preventing that loss of confidential or sensitive information,” says Brian Burke, research manager for Security Products at IDC. ”CipherTrust has been an industry leader in providing policy-based gateway security solutions to protect the messaging infrastructures of some of the largest global enterprises. The company’s IronNet extends that policy across multiple channels, and provides administrators with numerous enforcement options, including encryption, for the most integrated, comprehensive approach to outbound content compliance.”

According to CipherTrust, IronNet’s plug-and-play installation does not require any significant changes to the network or user environment. Among other things, IronNet:

• Unifies policy enforcement. Administrators can set and enforce defined corporate policies, and apply those policies across all messaging protocols company wide. When used with CipherTrust Central, administrators can combine policies for all inbound and outbound messaging traffic, and access comprehensive reports illustrating usage, violations and trends.
• Prevents unauthorized protocol use. IronNet analyzes HTTP- and FTP-based activity including Webmail services such as MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Google GMail, message board and blog postings, peer-to-peer and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services such as Skype™, and FTP transmissions to prevent unauthorized protocol use before the infraction occurs.
• Blocks, quarantines and alerts. The solution analyzes all outbound messaging traffic in real time, monitoring for confidential information, private customer or employee data such as private healthcare, financial, identity or other sensitive information, and enforces active responses such as blocking, quarantining or alerting administrators, compliance officers or other policy enforcement officers.
• Encrypts traffic. Integrated, policy-driven encryption with support for multiple technologies is provided —including gateway-to-gateway (SSL/TLS, SMIME, OpenPGP) and gateway-to-user (push, pull)—to automatically encrypt data without requiring end-user involvement.
• Archives. IronNet monitors and logs all messaging traffic.
• Provides messaging traffic intelligence. Administrators and company compliance officers can gain a complete understanding of policy violations and enforcement actions taken through a set of easy-to-use and understand reports.

This latest launch complements the company’s IronIM  gateway security appliance that was introduced last month.

CipherTrust IronNet will be available in the first quarter of 2006.