Sophos Marries DLP to Anti-Virus Software

While the concept of using common agent software to deliver multiple services is not that new, Sophos is jumping on the idea as part of it plan to aggressively expand into another market.

Sophos expects that this approach will find favor with IT organizations that want to use the same agent technology, management console and processes to deploy both DLP and anti-virus software. In addition, Sophos executives noted that their implementation of DLP will reside directly on the end point, which they argue will prove to be a more effective approach than implementing DLP on a network gateway.

By integrating its DLP and anti-virus software on top of the same agent, Sophos is trying to end run Symantec, which first outlined a unified approach to leveraging the same agent technology across multiple products several years ago.

In the meantime, IT organizations have become acutely sensitive to the performance overhead associated with running multiple agents from different vendors on each end point, given the amount of computing resources each individual agent consumes.

As time goes on, IT organizations should see just about every security vendor moving toward a common agent framework to deliver multiple software services in response to customer concerns over management overhead and as a way to more easily expand their product portfolios.