Security giants show new products at RSA

With the RSA Conference cranking up, EMC's security division RSA and Symantec have rolled out security product releases.

Symantec also said it would acquire Mi5 Networks which makes the Secure Web Gateway for an undisclosed price. The gateway appliance, which can filter out web malware and enforce application controls, "fills a gap" in Symantec's product portfolio, said Symantec executives Blake McConnell and Joan Fazio.

In addition to the acquisition of Mi5, Symantec also rolled out three separate products. Two are bundled packages under the Symantec Protection Suite label for both small and large organisations that want combined anti-malware, messaging and network-access control functions for desktop and server.

The third is the Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition intended for organisations of fewer than 100 end users which includes Windows-based anti-malware, intrusion prevention and firewall with a newly-design management console.

"It's simplified from the management perspective," says Blake McConnell, senior director security product development at Symantec. "It's installation and deployment from a small-business perspective."

RSA, the security division of EMC, will be announcing Project Share, an effort the firm says is intended to see security become more a part of cloud-based services and mobile computing. The concept, announced by RSA president Art Coviello in his keynote address at the conference today, will entail RSA making available for free its BSAFE encryption toolkit in certain versions, including the C++ and Java versions. Pricing would otherwise easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

In other announcements, RSA will announce RSA Solution for SharePoint which makes use of RSA's data-leak prevention product with Microsoft SharePoint.

"We're also releasing reference architecture on how to apply DLP, access control and log management to SharePoint," using the RSA security-event management product, enVision, said Dave Howell, senior manager of solutions marketing at RSA.

Wednesday RSA plans to a security announcement related to virtualised software from VMware, also owned by EMC.

While McAfee isn't trotting out new products at the conference, the security firm did have news related to its Security Innovation Alliance program, in which third-party vendors participate to integrate McAfee technologies, particularly the APIs for its ePolicy Orchestrator management console. The SIA program, now at 55 partners, this week officially added Authenex, Cryptotech, eIQnetworks, Novell, S21sec, Solidcore, Trimfant, and Telos, the firm said on Tuesday.