Symantec To Buy Sygate

Symantec Tuesday said that it has agreed to acquire network access control vendor Sygate Technologies. Terms of the deal, subject to approvals, were not disclosed.

Sygate's technology will allow Symantec to offer a solution that addresses security, compliance and remediation requirements of today's large enterprises, the company said.

Sygate’s network access control products enforce security by ensuring that all devices connected to a network are running the appropriate security solutions, are configured correctly and possess up-to-date patches.

Once the deal closes, Symantec AntiVirus and Symantec Client Security customers will be able to license and deploy Sygate's Network Access Control (SNAC) agent to provide endpoint compliance, Symantec said. The company also plans to integrate its remediation capabilities such as LiveUpdate and LiveState Patch Manager and its data availability solutions into a more robust endpoint compliance solution.

Just last week, Sygate introduced Sygate Enterprise Protection (SEP) 5.0, software with device agents that do double duty by delivering both host intrusion prevention (HIP) and network access control (NAC) to millions of networked devices.

With SEP 5.0, Sygate takes the NAC tools it has traditionally offered and blends with them additional HIP tools that can help prevent, for example, unauthorized copying of files to removable media, such as USB storage devices or CD/DVD burners.

SEP 5.0 also improves security at the operating system, application and network layers by helping to prevent buffer overflow attacks, application vulnerabilities like unauthorized executable code, and network-based worms, according to the Fremont, Calif., company.