10 Security Vendors Shine At CeBIT 2008

IT security remains a top-of-mind issue for companies of all sizes, and at this year's CeBIT conference, vendors pushed the benefits of data leak prevention, mobile device encryption, video surveillance, and pretty much everything up to and including locking your door at night. ChannelWeb patrolled the security pavilion in Hall 6 at CeBIT and the following is a roundup of what we encountered.

ESET

Eset, a Slovak Republic-based security vendor with U.S. offices in San Diego, highlighted the fact that its flagship antivirus product, ESET NOD32 Antivirus, now supports Windows Server 2008, Vista Service Pack 1, and XP service pack 3. The company also had one of the most visually arresting booths at CeBIT 2008.

MCAFEE, SAFEBOOT

McAfee re-entered the encryption market with last October's $350 million acquisition of SafeBoot, and at CeBIT, began touting encryption as part of its product line. SafeBoot's technologies and McAfee's existing data leak prevention offerings have been rolled up into a new Data Protection product business unit, headed by SafeBoot CEO Gerhard Watzinger, who reports to McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt.

SafeBoot, which had just 145 employees worldwide, relied heavily on its strong channel partnerships, and for this reason, was a good fit for McAfee, said Thomas Maxeiner, product manager in the SafeBoot business unit. Later this month, McAfee will announce the integration of SafeBoot's technology into its ePolicy Orchestrator security management tool, according to Maxeiner.

KASPERSKY LAB

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab showed off the latest versions of its Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Mobile Security 7.0, as well as new products such as Kaspersky Anti-Virus Mobile Enterprise Edition and Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Server Enterprise Edition.

ASTARO

Astaro, based in Burlington, Mass., last month launched a trade-in program that offers 20 percent off the list price on Astaro hardware, software, and maintenance for 3 or 5 year agreements for customers who return a Cisco Pix firewall appliance, which the San Jose, Calif.-networking giant recently stopped 5.

TREND MICRO

Tokyo-based Trend Micro talked up its recent acquisition of Identum, a developer of identity-based email encryption, as well as the recently announced integration of its ProtectLink Gateway with Linksys by Cisco Small Business routers.

GDATA

German security firm GData attracted crowds of curious onlookers with a foosball contest promotion that sought to highlight the firm's security offerings, including TotalCare 2008, which adds backup and data retrieval and perfomance tuning to the security mix.

IRONPORT

Cisco subsidiary Ironport, based in San Bruno, Calif., focused on strategies for data loss prevention at CeBIT 2008.

F-SECURE

F-Secure, based in Helsinki, Finland, talked about the results of a recent study of mobile phone users that highlighted differences in the way Europeans and Americans view mobile device security. While a majority of Europeans believe that mobile users bear the responsibility for making sure their devices have adequate security, in U.S., most users believe that carriers should be responsible for the task.

MOBOTIX

German physical security vendor Mobotix, which has its U.S. offices in New York City, brought along its large collection of high resolution Linux-based surveillance cameras.

Gdata used this funny advertisement to warn users of the dangers that can enter corporate networks through any Ethernet port. Translation: "Criminals Can Come In Through Here".