How do you define "SMB"?

I'm currently attending Trend Micro's first Analyst Day in New York. Steve Quane, executive general manager of Trend's SMB Business Unit offered a great way to define the small and mid-sized business market for security solutions: if you ask a decision maker in a company to define "hash" and they respond with either "breakfast" or "controlled substance", they're an SMB customer. :)

AOTA Summit

Sitting in the first session of the Authentication & Online Trust Alliance (AOTA) Summit in Seattle as I write this. Fairly well attended and lots of interesting content expected. More to come...

NemX SecurExchange

NemX announced today SecurExchange for Microsoft Exchange 2007. The company claims to be "the first vendor to offer a full
suite of rich, powerful and flexible email compliance functionality for the Exchange 2007 platform."

SecurExchange is an important offering, particularly in light of the growing importance of searching email and other electronic content for e-discovery and content scanning purposes. For example, SecurExchange can scan emails for concepts related to certain words instead of just the words themselves. As noted in the company's press release, when searching for the concept of "Confidential", the system will place greater weight on the word when used in the footer of a document than if it is used in the body text. SecurExchange will also scan strings of numbers not only for the presence of a 15- or 16-digit number that might indicate a credit card number being sent in clear text, but will also perform a checksum to verify the validity of that number.

Our research has found that email volumes are growing at roughly 30% per year. That means that the volume of email sent or stored will be roughly 3.7 times greater in five years than today. That will make the importance of tools that can intelligently scan email content ever more important.

MER Conference

I spoke at the Cohasset Associates MER (Managing Electronic Records) Conference in Chicago yesterday and am attending the keynotes today, as well. This is a small conference (about 500 people) focused on records management, but there has been a great deal of discussion on email and electronic content archiving. I would highly recommend this conference to anyone interested in email archiving and the broader implications it has for overall records management practices.

How much money do Italians make?

Now you can find out. The Italian government posted the earnings of every Italian on the Web. More information is available here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7376608.stm

While this was apparently legal according to Italian law, many were very upset by the decision of the outgoing government to post this data. For those countries in which posting sensitive information or other confidential data isn't legal, it points out the critical nature of deploying data leak protection (DLP) systems that will guard against intentional or inadvertent breaches. Our research shows that these types of systems are seriously underdeployed, making the breach of corporate data all too likely.

IT spending in 2008

We have just concluded a large survey on email, Web and IM security among mid-sized and large organizations in North America and will be publishing a report on our findings shortly. One of the questions we asked was about overall IT spending plans in 2008 -- here's what we found:

48% of organizations will spend more in 2008 than in 2007
18% will spend less
28% will spend about the same
6% are not sure

Interact 2008

I attended Interact 2008 in San Diego today and will be at RSA tomorrow. Interact offers a nice view into what Microsoft is doing in the UM and UC spheres, with lots of good information provided in a number of sessions, including some frank comments on areas in which Microsoft needs to bolster its UM and UC offerings.

Some observations:

- Microsoft views Exchange as a mature offering that, in some ways, will act as a "mentor" for OCS. OCS will steal some best practices from Exchange, such as the capabilities of Systems Center, improvement of the command line interface in OCS and working with common partners for both platforms. Microsoft's goal is to make both Exchange and OCS "look like they come from the same vendor".

- Exchange and OCS share some of the same architectural focus and engineering, but different business pressures force them to be "out of phase" with one another, although Microsoft anticipates coordinating Exchange and OCS to a greater degree in the future.

- Saw an impressive demonstration of Exchange UM in action; each server can support about 10,000 users.

- There are currently 71,316 users at Microsoft on Exchange UM.

In all, Interact 2008 was definitely time well spent even if San Diego was cold and windy today.