FaceTime Communications, the leading provider of solutions for securing and managing greynets such as instant messaging (IM), peer-to-peer (P2P), VoIP, and web conferencing, today announced new capabilities for the safe and productive use of enterprise IM across distributed organizations.
IMAuditor 8.0 provides extended support for the latest versions of Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) and Public Instant Messaging (PIM) applications such as Jabber XCP 5.1, IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5, and Microsoft's Live Communications Server 2005, AIM Triton, MSN 8.0 and Yahoo 8.0. This update enables comprehensive management of mobile workers and scalability of the security infrastructure across multi-site deployments, and captures and archives file transfers. The new capabilities allow organizations to prevent inbound threats, minimize information leakage, and maintain corporate and regulatory compliance, while embracing the benefits of real-time communications.
According to Osterman Research, two-thirds of enterprises will adopt enterprise instant messaging by the middle of 2007. EIM provides a unified approach to real-time communications – providing the efficiencies and productivity advantages that users require along with the manageability and security demanded by IT. EIM offers advantages such as federation, which is the unified use of public IM networks under one convenient login, adding voice and web conferencing capabilities.
"Instant messaging is part of an evolving unified communications platform that will include unified messaging, web, audio and video conferencing, and voice over IP calls," said Chris Christiansen, program vice president for IDC. "FaceTime is well-positioned to address this trend with its own evolving comprehensive security and compliance solution design to ensure the safe and productive use of IP-based communications in the enterprise."
While the functionality and role of EIM is evolving, security and compliance management of these applications is becoming paramount. EIM networks are at risk from the same inbound threats from worms, viruses, root kits, spyware and malware that have targeted public IM and email applications, particularly in a federated environment with public and other EIM networks. At the same time, organizations must protect against business risks of information leakage and maintain corporate and regulatory compliance across all communications applications. IMAuditor 8.0 provides a solution for the security and compliance challenges posed by EIM, while giving enterprises the flexibility to implement their own policies and empower employees with these real-time collaborative applications.
"Large enterprises are evaluating enterprise IM to gain a competitive edge through the increased efficiency and productivity offered by IM and real-time communications," said Kailash Ambwani, president and CEO of FaceTime Communications. "Now, more than ever, securing IM must extend to secure and control all of the greynets that deliver VoIP, web conferencing and other real-time communications applications."