Vendors Partner On Data Encryption

With the loss or theft of customer data filling the headlines, more businesses are looking to encrypt data and other content traveling over their networks. But encryption imposes challenges: All content doesn't need to be encrypted, and information that is encrypted can be difficult to later search and find.

Two vendors on Monday unveiled the results of a partnership that's designed to make it easier to automatically encrypt specific kinds of content. Vontu Inc. will provide the content filtering and monitoring, and PGP Corp. will provide encryption.

The two are integrating Vontu 4.0 with PGP Universal 2.0. to enforce encryption policies preset by IT administrators and help prevent confidential content from ending up in the wrong hands. More extensive use of encryption, they argue, can help companies comply with new regulations, protect their brand names, and reduce the chances of financial losses by consumers and other customers.

Businesses can use the joint product to designate what kinds of content should be encrypted and then enforce those policies through the use of content filtering. Without such filtering capabilities, all data sent over the network get encrypted, creating extra work for IT administrators later searching for specific pieces of information.

While the partnership isn't offering a way to make it simple to access encrypted data, the joint product does move customers closer to that ideal, says Gartner analyst Rich Mogull. "Customers don't have to pick the items to encrypt manually," he says. "It's a safety net to catch the encryption customers didn't do manually."