NEWTON, MASS. - With 2003 around the corner, consider these New Year's resolutions: Better secure your networks, more efficiently manage your company's content, and rethink how to exploit the Internet.

That's the advice of industry experts who spoke last week on a panel sponsored by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).

Companies could use more sophisticated security tools, including better management software, said Dan Keldsen, senior analyst and IS director for Delphi Group. But to take advantage of such tools, companies first need to make security more of a businesswide effort.

"Security is not one person's or one department's responsibility. It needs to be more effectively addressed across the board in enterprise companies," he said. "Hackers share more information about how to break into networks than enterprises do about how to protect against hackers."

Keldsen predicted correlation, playback and host-based intrusion-prevention products will flourish next year.

Products that correlate data from multiple security devices already have started to roll out from companies such as Network Intelligence and SilentRunner. But Keldsen said he expects offerings with more intelligence to roll out - and be adopted - in the months ahead.

Playback products - tools that replay events and show a map of the network when a security problem was detected - will help security specialists discover holes and other attacks when taking a second look at the network. And a new breed of honeypot or honeynet products will emerge, Keldsen predicted. He said these will work to trap hackers before they do damage, letting security managers move from a reactive to proactive mode. Symantec (through its recent acquisition of Recourse Technologies) is among the players in this market.

Keldsen encouraged network executives to learn more about host-based intrusion-prevention products, too. Unlike traditional intrusion-detection offerings, which mainly identify attacks, the newer products also can be instructed to block them.

Another technology to watch is content management, said Geoffrey Bock, senior vice president at Patricia Seybold Group. He said the tools currently in place for content management can handle content within individual repositories but not across them. Bock said all content should be seen as shared data by management systems. But he said Web content management, electronic document management, digital asset management and enterprise content management still exist in stovepipes.

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