E-mail security products to launch at RSA show

SAN JOSE - Messaging vendors this week will unveil a host of e-mail security products at the RSA 2000 show in San Jose. Companies making announcements include Viasec in Donegal, Ireland, and Content Technologies in Kirkland, Wash.

"The RSA show is becoming more important for the security industry," says Ian Poynter, president of Jerboa, a security consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. "We see more activity there."

Viasec will announce Consus 2.0, a secure e-mail gateway that encrypts and authenticates messages coming into and going out of a company's network via the Internet. Consus works with any Simple Mail Transfer Protocol-based e-mail system and supports the Secure Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) e-mail standard. It uses strong encryption algorithms up to Triple-Data Encryption Standard. A certificate management system and certificate authority are built into the software for generating digital signatures. Consus is server software that runs on Windows NT.

The new version of Consus adds load-balancing tools that lets the software run simultaneously on as many as 12 servers. Previous versions worked on a single server only.

"The new version opens us up to the enterprise market," says Maurice McMullin, chief technical officer at Viasec. "Now we have the redundancy and scalability to support large organizations."

McMullin says geographically dispersed companies can run the new version of the software on servers at multiple sites over a WAN. A single management console can oversee the software at all the locations. "We're not using loads of bandwidth, keeping all the servers in sync," he says.

Pricing for Consus 2.0 will range from $80 per seat for a 25-user package to $30 per seat for a 1,000-user package, McMullin says.

The improved fault tolerance of Consus 2.0 "will allow us to discuss the product with a lot more of our customers," Poynter says. "This functionality is essential to place it in larger corporations."

Jerboa has been using earlier versions of Consus to encrypt and digitally sign all of the firm's outgoing e-mail. The company's experience with Consus has been positive.

"We haven't noticed any delays," Poynter says.

Content Technologies, which sells the popular MIMEsweeper e-mail content management and security software, will announce a new product geared toward application service providers, a spokeswoman says.

Meanwhile, Tumbleweed Software in Redwood City, Calif., will demonstrate its new Java-based S/MIME software, which doesn't require any S/MIME on the recipient desktop. The Java applet was announced last year.

Viasec: www.viasec.com; Content Technologies: www.contenttechnologies.com ; Tumbleweed: www.tumbleweed.com