June 21, 2007

FEATURE EDITORIAL

Compliance and Ethical Walls for Group Chat

Regulation and compliance continue to impact the evolution of business communications. News yesterday coming from SIFMA (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) Technology Conference included the Parlano, Inc. announcement of enhanced compliance capabilities for its MindAlign 2007 product, a persistent group chat solution for the enterprise. MindAlign 2007 organizes cross-functional teams in topic-based, business-class chatrooms (channels). The announcement noted the immediate availability of pre-packaged compliance adapters that integrate MindAlign 2007 with leading solutions for securing, logging and archiving electronic business communications. These adapters build on the April launch of MindAlign 2007, which introduced a new compliance framework that simplifies integration with compliance systems via XML-based transformations rather than programmatic interfaces.

With this release, Parlano is providing configurable compliance adaptors for Akonix, Assentor, and Facetime built on the new framework. The company says the XML-based approach also simplifies integration of any commercial or custom compliance system with MindAlign. Parlano plans to announce additional pre-packaged compliance adapters in the near future.

With the new MindAlign 2007 compliance framework, pre-packaged and custom compliance adapters also benefit from a sophisticated queuing infrastructure that ensures that messages posted to a channel are captured and logged even during temporary compliance system downtime. This insulates MindAlign 2007 from the compliance system and enables fully compliant business-critical chat to continue rather than being blocked during outages. Parlano also announced the immediate availability of enhanced functionality in MindAlign 2007 to proactively enforce "ethical walls" that prevent group chat between parties with conflicts of interest, such as energy traders and energy producers, or equity traders and mergers-and-acquisition professionals. The enhanced capability utilizes pre-defined "channel categories" that determine channel membership from Microsoft Active Directory domains, organizational units, and/or groups. Channel categories also reduce administrative costs because channel types that control membership, channel visibility, and other channel behaviors are configured up front and used repeatedly when new channels are created. The company points out that they also eliminate the potential breach of compliance that occurs in other chat systems when "super user" administrator privileges are required to manage channels, which then allow those users to monitor all conversations within the organization.

Availability

The enhanced compliance capabilities are available as separately licensable components of MindAlign 2007 and will be available in early July.

mindSHIFT Technologies and Parlano

In more SIFMA Technology Conference news from Parlano this week, mindSHIFT Technologies and Parlano, Inc. announced a strategic partnership that will enable the two companies to provide financial services organizations and their trading partners with secure, federated group chat as a hosted solution. The planned mindSHIFT and Parlano technology will include Parlano MindAlign 2007. mindSHIFT, a provider of managed IT and compliance services, will perform the hosting for MindAlign and Microsoft Live Communications Server, with the option of fully managed SEC, NASD and other compliance services.

The companies say this solution is the only hosted enterprise instant messaging technology with persistent group chat that includes not only logging of chat and IM communications, but also the option of integrated shipment, archival, surveillance, and discovery.

Clearswift Partners with FaceTime

Clearswift this week announced the launch of MIMEsweeper IM Enterprise Edition, powered by FaceTime Communications. The new appliance and software solution complements Clearswift's existing web and email content security products to provide customers with a complete Enterprise Content Governance portfolio to cover all user interactions with the Internet. According to the companies, MIMEsweeper IM Enterprise Edition is an instant messaging and real-time Internet communications security solution, which provides granular policy and control, as well as full threat prevention to help organizations achieve regulatory compliance.

Securing the Enterprise

Because users are adopting IM and real-time applications, either officially or unofficially, into normal business practices, organizations should apply the same in-depth content policy controls used for email and web traffic in order to meet security, legal, compliance and productivity imperatives. According to research from FaceTime Communications, eight out of ten users are using real-time applications at work and four in ten have installed such applications without IT department approval. While the benefits of real-time applications to businesses are significant, according to research from FaceTime, there are also dangers to consider. Eight out of ten (81 percent) IT managers' businesses have suffered attacks related to such applications in the previous six months. The research, conducted last year, included a large sample of corporate IT managers and end-users across all size organizations in North America, UK and Europe.

IN THE NEWS

Astaro Releases Analysis and Reporting Solution for Unified Threat Management Appliances

Astaro Corporation a unified threat management (UTM) security appliances provider, today announced the release of version 4.6 of the Astaro Report Manager. The analysis and reporting solution allows IT administrators to gather, correlate and display information about all firewall and network activity, attacks and attempted security breaches. The company believes that the Astaro Report Manager 4.6 saves companies time and effort in day-to-day security monitoring and incident response by providing enterprise-wide security intelligence. The reporting tool displays gathered information in an easy-to-read, customizable report displayed as charts and diagrams, which can be directly analyzed, or forwarded by email.

Availability

Astaro Report Manager 4.6 supports all Astaro Security Gateway versions from 7.0 and is now available via Astaro's worldwide partner network. Price for a basic software license starts at US$295. For management of pre-installed Astaro Security Gateway hardware appliances, pricing starts at US$395. Customers with existing support contracts are entitled to upgrade to the latest version at no additional cost.

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