Compliance In A Box

I was in the San Francisco Bay Area last week, where I took some time to drop in on my long-time business contact Joe Fantuzzi, who is CEO of security company Workshare. He’s ex of Autodesk, where he was a big fan of the channel, a leaning he has brought with him to his new company: For the December quarter, about 70 percent of its sales went through the channel, compared with 24 percent a year earlier.

Actually, last year I would have called Workshare a document rights management company, but with its next line of product releases in June called the Protect Enterprise Suite -- which will come not just as software but as handy dandy appliances -- the company is planting its feet firmly on security soil.

Workshare Protect Network, for example, will come as a $5,000 appliance that Fantuzzi hopes will be more appealing to solution providers. The twist is that this device is concerned with scrubbing outbound content and preventing embarrassing (or illegal) disclosures of information. (Consider the Google financial gaffe earlier this year for context.) A policy manager also is forthcoming in mid-June, when the new suite is supposed to ship.

Protect Network does its job on several related levels. Depending on how it’s configured, it can block certain correspondence such as pornography or unauthorized financial disclosures outright or provide tattle-tale alerts that questionable behavior has occurred. It also examines for metadata and privacy-sensitive wording.

What’s planned for the future is the "cure." In other words, eventually the appliance will be able to redact wording or mark up a document to protect the specific sensitive information. Yes, privacy police, something for you to debate. But as Fantuzzi points out, it’s great for companies exhausted with trying to keep up with compliance regulations. “If you show you were trying to do the right thing, it reflects well,” he says.

On a completely unrelated note, one definition of appliance is simply a household gadget that uses electricity. Which makes me wonder why we’re all so fond of the term in the high-tech industry.

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