Security Startups Take Center Stage

A host of security start-ups, which were on display at the recent DEMO conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., have a variety of technologies designed to make all aspects of business more secure and efficient in the coming months.

That at least a half-dozen of DEMO's 61 presenting companies were from the security space showed just how important the sector is. All these companies are following the mantra of Liquid Machines president and CEO Jim Schoonmaker, who says, "The way we think about security must change; it's no longer just about firewalls." The Lexington, Mass.-based company has developed an information security platform that focuses on unauthorized e-mailing or copying of files by users who have access to a network. Although many security tools rely on protecting a network from perimeter attacks, numerous studies have shown that many organizations' biggest security risks come from within. Liquid Machines develops applications that use a policy-based system to dictate, track, and enforce what level of access each employee has to a company's internal documents.

Policy-based systems are among the latest innovation to hit the security space. Another such developer is Preventsys, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based provider of tools that automate the auditing and assessing process of large distributed networks, primarily for Global 2000 companies. The company's AudIT Server technology takes a "hacker's-eye view" of every node on a network, examining it for vulnerabilities. "We can audit every node on a network with a frequency that would have prevented the SQL Slammer and similar viruses," says Preventsys CTO John Williams. Also presenting at DEMO was PKWare, whose PKZip data compression and security software enables users to protect communications and reduce network bandwidth requirements when transmitting large confidential files.

Another company preaching the prevention theme is BigFix, the Emeryville, Calif.-based developer of the BigFix Development Environment (BDE), which lets IT departments and help desks quickly author new patches and updates. BDE is an extension of the company's Patch Manager and Enterprise Suite products and includes "Fixlet messages," which are encoded to inspect a computer's hardware and software attributes and take any necessary repair actions. BigFix CEO Steve Larsen says his company's tools can help prevent infection from viruses that 90 percent of the time hit vulnerabilities the company already knows are there.

Rounding out the security tools presentations were MagiQ Technologies, a New York-based developer of Navajo, a quantum key distribution system that integrates into organizations' existing infrastructures; Sigma Security, maker of SigmaWatch 3.0, a vulnerability management and modeling tool; and Delean Vision, a French company that makes Visual Skin Print, a biometric technology that uses the details of an individual's skin to identify and authenticate them the way a fingerprint or handprint would.

The products from Delean, MagiQ, Preventsys, and Liquid Machines are in beta currently or available to select customers. The rest are available now.