RSA 2008: Security and control over social networking sites and Facebook widgets

FaceTime today announced significant new capabilities for its Unified Security Gateway (USG) designed to provide IT managers with management, security and control over 140 social networking sites, 20,000 individual Facebook widgets and more than 400 Web and real-time applications. These applications include IPTV, P2P file sharing multimedia, applications and instant messaging clients. The new capabilities complement the USGs URL filtering, anti-malware and IM and P2P management capabilities and will be available in 30 days.

The FaceTime Unified Security Gateway (USG) is a secure Web gateway appliance that enables enterprises to control the new Internet, including Web and real-time communications. USG integrates management, security and compliance of Web communications, social networking, consumer-driven greynet applications such as public IM, Skype and P2P and enterprise-class Unified Communications suites such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and IBM Lotus Sametime. From a single platform, organizations can enable and enforce safe and productive use of these applications and protect the network against inbound malware, mitigate information leakage risks and insure that corporate, regulatory and e-discovery needs are met.

The USG integrates gateway malware protection and Web filtering with FaceTime’s best-in-class IM hygiene and archiving, in a purpose-built, hardened appliance. With this single point of control, organizations can gain complete visibility of all Internet communications and reduce total cost of ownership using a simpler solution that is easily administered by the IT staff.

Key capabilities of USG include:

• Centralized policy management and control – single point of control for setting and enforcing policy for all elements of Web browsing, Unified communications IM, and hundreds of real-time applications in use in the enterprise
• Web Filtering – powerful policies to monitor and control Web access to more than 70 categories and millions of URLs with integrated ” user coaching” features
• Social networking management and control – detailed reporting and granular control over more than 20,000 Facebook widgets at corporate, group and user levels.
• Content hygiene and security – Web-based malware prevention, virus scanning of file attachments, worm blocking, spIM protection and keyword content filtering for both UC-generated as well as federated public IM
• Regulatory compliance archiving and workflow – guaranteed logging of all UC and public IM communications including capture and archival of file attachments, tamper-resistant storage of messages, and robust and easy-to-use review and audit capabilities
• Easy administration and management – browser-based management interface for policy configuration, compliance workflow and message retrieval for e-discovery
• Flexible reporting – improved decision-making about security issues and Internet usage through integrated real-time reporting and monitoring, and compatibility with leading third-party reporting applications