Vendors Fire Up Data Forensics

With CIOs in the financial sector coming under increasing pressure to lock down their data, more vendors are touting data forensics as a way to avoid embarrassing and costly storage snafus. (See Enterprises Suffer Breaches and Breaches Stress Need to Improve.)

Today, John Mathon, one of the co-founders of business intelligence vendor Tibco, took the wraps off his new company, Mathon Systems, which aims to reduce users' data security worries. (See Mathon Offers Risk Software.) Elsewhere, legal services firm Litigation Solution Inc. plans to launch a new Forensic Vault service to copy data from firms' desktops and portable computers as a in case of future litigation.

The new Mathon Integral software captures metadata on files such as Word documents and spreadsheets. "It's the type of information that you need if you're doing a forensic analysis," says Angus MacDonald, the company's CEO and co-founder.

The software, which runs on a standard x86 Windows or Linux server, draws data from the likes of EMC and NetApp file systems. This is then used to produce an audit trail, noting which users have touched specific documents, the location of the documents, and their specific attributes.

According to MacDonald, Mathon can also help users classify their data, something which has been cited as a major hurdle in the path of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). (See Users Cite ILM Shortfalls, Intel Faces ILM Challenge, and Users Self-Destruct on Governance.)"By default, we capture 250 pieces of metadata per file," says the exec, explaining that this ranges from specific keywords, such as social security numbers, to finding out which IP addresses are associated with the document.

The idea here is that users can use this information to build up a picture of their internal data and avoid a costly and embarrassing data security breach. (See Financial Security: Priceless, IT Managers Sweat Security, and Don't Be a Data Privacy Dunce.) "As one CIO put it, 'Every Gbyte we store, we're just loading another bullet into the gun to allow them to shoot us,' " explains MacDonald.

John Webster, senior analyst at the Data Mobility Group, believes there is a pressing need for this type of technology. "If the legal department wants to see all the documents that were touched in the last year by every employee or a group of employees, this is a quick way to go about it."

The analyst also believes that the potential uses of this technology stretch way beyond the financial sector. "It's a product with much broader appeal," he explains, adding that the startup will need to ramp its sales and marketing to break out of the financial niche.

MacDonald told Byte and Switch that the startup also has its eye on other regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals and the telecom sector. Over the next 12 months Mathon is likely to increase its headcount from 20 to 50, largely in areas such as engineering, sales, and customer support.Although another startup, Tizor, offers an auditing appliance for file servers, Webster says that, at this stage, Mathon's approach is more focused on metadata tagging and indexing corporate data.

Mathon's software is offered on a subscription basis and pricing starts at less than $10,000 a month for around 50 users, according to MacDonald. The exec, however, adds that Mathon's average deal size is around $200,000 per year.

Litigation Solution is taking a different approach to data security, essentially copying and storing computer data, which can then be re-formatted by a firm's IT staff. The need to maintain all forms of information was underlined earlier this year, when Morgan Stanley was slammed with a $15 million fine by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after it was unable to produce email evidence in court. (See Email Travail.)

Prices for Litigation Solution's new Forensic Vault service, which will be launched tomorrow, start at $500.

James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch