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New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, reveals that revenues in the European Content Security Market totalled $1.80 billion in 2006, and are likely to reach $3.35 million in 2010.
The European content security market is gathering pace, particularly with enterprise security gaining priority due to the ever increasing need to protect critical information from the emerging threats and attacks. Furthermore, employee productivity is becoming an area of focus and in the recent past, Europe has also been reviving its legislative directives, necessitating greater investments in security. These factors, coupled with the growing consolidation, are like to provide entry and exit options for the investment community.
“The European security industry at large is in the limelight, as growing signs of market maturity in the North American region have heightened the focus on the less mature European and the growing Asian markets” notes Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst Raja Srinivasan. “Regulatory compliances, employee productivity concerns, and the growing demand for proactive solutions to counter new and innovative security threats are all expected to drive content security investments across Europe.”
Source: Frost & Sullivan
A recent study from PixAlert, found pornography on one in four PCs despite the use of content filtering technology at the gateway.
PixAlert audited 10,000 PCs on 125 business and public sector networks over the last 9 months. The study found that 25% of the computers contained pornography or “other inappropriate images.” The same audit found that 12.4% of the 12,000 e-mail accounts and 5.4% of 26,000 file server shares scanned were similarly affected.
“With over a third of all images found created in the last 12 months, it is clear that a significant number of employees continue to ignore corporate policies and in some cases are going to extraordinary lengths to bypass protection systems in order to obtain and distribute inappropriate material,” said Andy Churley, a director at PixAlert, in a written statement. “Corporate officers wrongly assume that boundary protection systems stop all digital pornography from entering the organization but, in PixAlert’s experience, almost all corporations will have a significant amount of pornography on their networks.”
The study found that 46.8% of the images showed full nudity or sexual activity and 0.3% of all the images were determined to be illegal. While 35% were downloaded online images, 45.2% of the images detected came from e-mails. The study also found that 35.5% were sent internally.
“While all organisations actively discourage access to inappropriate images at work, our audits show that the reality is that all establishments have a lot of digital pornography residing on their networks that they don’t know about. Companies are particularly concerned when they have visibility of the number of pornographic images being distributed by e-mail internally or sent out to other organisations using a corporate e-mail address.” said Churley.
Source: InformationWeek, 17 April 2007
MessageLabs on Thursday announced upgrades to its content and image control service offerings that feature greater accuracy and can scan more document types for allowable content.
MessageLabs’ Email Content Control 3.0 and Email Image Control 2.0 are offered as managed services that scan inbound and outbound e-mails for inappropriate, confidential or malicious content sent or received by an organization’s employees. The services help companies implement acceptable e-mail use policies and ensure compliance with a range of government and industry regulations, according to company officials.
The upgraded services now feature the ability to scan within Microsoft Office document attachments and include customizable notifications, so that e-mail administrators can change the text within a notification to better fit the organization, they say.
Email Content Control 3.0 also features a reorganized management interface that makes rule details easier to find, and can decompress files for scanning. The service can use the same security policies implemented by a company’s e-mail system, and rules can be set on a user-by-user basis, officials say. Email Image Control 2.0 includes new algorithms for analysing image attributes in order to accurately distinguish inappropriate content, officials say.
“Businesses are increasingly dependent on email as a primary communication tool,” said Michael D. Osterman, President, Osterman Research. “But it presents several risks for controlling confidential and valuable information from leaving the organization. Content filtering — inspecting the content of messages before they are sent — will assume a more important role within messaging management as a means of mitigating risks and managing corporate liability, and to make businesses feel more confident about their email systems.”
Frost & Sullivan finds that the World Content Filtering Market earned revenues of $1.31 billion in 2005 and estimates to reach $4.86 billion by 2012.
The content filtering market is taking over the IM market as well, since most IM vendors have been bought by content filtering vendors and most content filtering vendors now possess IM filtering capabilities. The diversification trend also applies to delivery modes. Earlier, vendors delivered solutions in the form of either software, appliances or managed services. This trend has changed and vendors are now offering two or three of the options of software, appliances and managed services.
Vendors that are competing in only web or email filtering and rely on a single delivery mode are rightfully concerned about their competitive potential. In such a scenario, considering mergers and acquisitions, or partnering in order to diversify their product offerings will prove beneficial. Diversification strategies can include both web and email filtering, strengthening outbound email filtering capabilities, or adding hardware and/or hosted services to product portfolios.
A free online Content Filtering & Assessment Costing Tool has been created to estimate the volume, cost and staff resources required in the assessment and processing of corporate emails (with suspicious message content) that have been stopped when using an email content filtering system.