Symantec Portfolio Enhanced With Vontu Acquisition, Partners Say

Solution providers say that Symantec's impending acquisition of data loss prevention vendor Vontu could grow sales, but question the impact on business in the short term.

Some solution providers hope that more security options contained under one roof with the Symantec Vontu purchase will bolster and strengthen their existing partnerships.

"I'm hoping it might be the catalyst to stimulate the relationship process," said David Dadian, CEO of powersolution.com in HoHoKus, N.J., an 11-year Symantec partner. "From the Symantec side of things, we'd like to see everything come into one house. It would make things so much easier."

"It will be interesting to see how it plays out," he added.

Other solution providers say that clients are just beginning to realize the need for DLP. However, even if awareness is there, limited staff and budgets might impede some businesses that want to acquire new and increasingly sophisticated security measures.

"We see a growth in the area but there is a long way to go before it is mainstream for the majority of the clients," said Darrel Bowman, CEO of Tacoma-based mynetworkcompany.com, formerly AppTech, via e-mail. "Most end users are still struggling to get their minds and budgets focused on the ever-increasing costs of all security. We expect DLP to continue to be just another weapon in every security vendor's arsenal against the increasing and continually morphing threats of the day."

The $350 million acquisition, expected to close at the end of this year, will add a large array of DLP technologies to the portfolio of security and storage options Symantec already offers. The San Francisco-based Vontu has been a partner since 2005, and Symantec personnel maintain that the acquisition was a logical next step in the fight to protect against increasingly sophisticated forms of data loss.

DLP solutions protect confidential or personal information from leaking or being sent outside the company. Specifically, Vontu specializes in solutions that prevent the exportation of sensitive data via e-mail, Web or IM. The company also provides technology that monitors and prevents confidential data from being copied to removable media or downloaded to local drives.

With security breaches becoming more common and costly in recent years, DLP has emerged as a significant issue for many business leaders and IT personnel. In fact, simple theft or loss of a computer or other data-storage medium comprised about 46 percent of all data breaches that could lead to identity theft, according to the 2007 January-June Symantec Internet Security Threat Report.

Several recent high profile scams have increased public awareness and brought the issue close to home. One such scam occurred at the end of 2005, in which hackers downloaded at least 45.7 million credit- and debit-card numbers from a Marshalls discount clothing store near St. Paul, Minn. The heist has so far been the largest known loss of credit card numbers in history.

Oliver Friedrichs, Symantec security response director, said that it anticipated that many more companies will start implementing DLP strategies to minimize these kinds of security risks in 2008.

"It's a cat and mouse game. We always have to stay ahead of the attackers," he said. "It's a battle that will probably never end."

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