With New Sophos DLP, OEM Partners Ensure Enterprises Remain Compliant

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - Mar 7, 2012) - IT security and data protection company Sophos today announced the availability of a new Software Development Kit for OEM partners to integrate Sophos Data Loss Prevention (DLP) into their solutions. With Sophos DLP, OEM Partners can identify and protect their customers' personal information and sensitive corporate data, helping them comply with data security regulations and prevent the loss of intellectual property.

Simplifying Compliance
Government and industry standards bodies continue to introduce new and update existing data protection legislation and regulations. As a result, organizations are legally bound to protect personal and financial data from unauthorized disclosure or misuse. At a minimum, organizations that do not implement appropriate controls to protect such data can face costly fines.

Data Loss Prevention is an established technology that enables enterprises to monitor and protect sensitive data using deep content inspection and contextual analysis. Over the past five years, DLP has evolved from being regarded as an expensive luxury item to a mainstream security tool.

According to IDC, "the worldwide DLP market grew from $279 million in 2009 to $362.7 million in 2010 and is expected to grow to $808 million by 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate of 17.4%."¹

Sophos DLP enables OEM partners to quickly implement DLP functionality in existing products, maintaining customer satisfaction and providing additional revenue opportunities.

Enhance Performance
The Sophos DLP OEM Software Development Kit delivers a high performance DLP search engine and companion library of sensitive data definitions created and maintained by SophosLabs. The library covers detection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for more than fifteen countries, detection of US (HIPAA), Canadian and UK health care patient data and specialized definitions for regulations such as PCI DSS.

File type detection and text content extraction is carried out by the Sophos threat detection engine (SAVI). This enables an OEM to conduct malware analysis and content extraction in a single scan, resulting in a positive impact on performance. It also means that there is no requirement to license third party content extraction libraries, thereby reducing implementation costs.

"By offering a DLP Software Development Kit in conjunction with our anti-malware engine, we are able to provide our OEM partners a solution they can easily integrate into their own solutions," said Michael Rogers, vice president Global OEM & Strategic Alliances, Sophos. "This solution will allow OEM partners to offer DLP at the gateway or on host solutions, giving them the ability to protect their customers' data in use and in motion."

About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions backed by SophosLabs -- a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.

¹ IDC Worldwide Data Loss Prevention 2011-2015 Forecast and 2010 Vendor Shares: DLP Gets More Embedded into Enterprise Infrastructure, doc #231367, December 2011.