Officials at IronPort Systems announced “defense in depth,” a partner alliance initiative Monday
to integrate its hardware-based, e-mail security gateway with software from
companies throughout the industry.
The San Bruno, Calif.-based company also expanded its relationship with
Symantec , signing a four-year OEM
use the company’s anti-spam and anti-virus engines in IronPort servers.
“IronPort is the only e-mail security appliance to have a multi-year OEM
agreement with Symantec,” said Scott Weiss, IronPort president and CEO, in a
statement. “This agreement means that the world’s largest ISPs and
corporations can rely on IronPort and Symantec for industrial-strength
e-mail security for years to come.”
Company officials want to make their products more than just an e-mail
gateway. They say the best way to do that is to include support for other
essential security services within the enterprise.
As such, the company is
bringing anti-spam/anti-virus, encryption, archiving and digital rights
management (DRM) vendors together to form the partnership alliance. So far,
the company has signed Authentica, PGP Corp., PostX, Sigaba Sophos and
Veritas.
The end goal of its defense in depth strategy is to create a one-stop security shop under one hardware
platform, taking the best-of-breed software from many different vendors and
integrating them at the source.
That, said Peter Schlampp, IronPort senior
director of product management, is the reason for its partnership alliance.
Customers want the protection advantage multiple vendors have over just
one type of security vendor.
The strategy includes
not just one layer of defense (i.e. one anti-spam vendor and one encryption
vendor), but many; Schlampp points to viruses or Trojans
another. With two vendors, he said, you increase the chance your network
won’t be compromised.
“If you allow a single vendor to protect your network, you’re actually doing
yourself a disservice,” he said. “If that vendor somehow misses an exploit
that could take advantage of your network, you’ve basically backed yourself
into a corner.”
The only problem that remains, of course, is to license the engines used by
the different vendors and get them incorporated into the IronPort servers.
Schlampp said some of its current partners’ products are integrated and
developers are working on getting the rest integrated, so customers don’t
have to maintain a separate server to handle their functions.
IronPort has been in the business of gaining industry consensus and
interoperability for some time, most notably through its Bonded
Server program.
The program is intended to bring ISPs, customers and
companies together to create an effective white list, an accredited, trusted
IP address that can pass through a spam filter, called SenderBase by officials.
