L7 Enterprise for Public IM
Instant messaging is one of the most popular communications tools today and many employees rely on it daily to communicate in real-time with co-workers, customers, and business partner. According to Osterman Research, over 90% of enterprises have employees accessing IM. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat with 95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013.. Such pervasive use and explosive growth present challenges for today's IT organizations as they try to meet their employees’ requirements for unfettered access to IM to continue to realize the productivity benefits provided by IM while at the same time protecting their networks from attacks and stopping the inappropriate use of IM.
The L7 Enterprise module for public IM provides the tools necessary to manage the use of public IM to ensure that IM is used appropriately and productively throughout the enterprise and to provide the reporting required for monitoring of adherence to policies on its use and billing business units or other internal groups for its management.
Benefits include:
Manage identities of IM users
- Directory synchronization - import userIDs from Microsoft Active Directory, IBM Lotus Domino, Novell eDirectory and other LDAP directories
- Screen name policy enforcement - ensure all screen names used by employees follow consistent pattern (such as name@company.com)
Define policies for the appropriate use of IM
- Granular policy management - content and keyword filtering, foul language filters and other policies for protecting against the inappropriate use of IM
- File transfer control - define company-wide or more granular permissions for the ability to transfer files over IM and scan files for viruses
- Ethical walls - set rules on who can talk with whom to block any unwanted or illegal conversations
360° Security for Real-Time Communications
360° Security is Comprised of Seven Layers of Integrated Security
Detection:
- Global Early Warning Center—made up of monitoring devices that identify new worms, trojans and other day zero threats in the shortest elapsed time from their release into the wild and forwards 'signatures'and poison URL's to the Akonix IM Security Center™
- Akonix IM Security Center—staffed with senior security engineers who create and push out new protective filters as quickly as the Early Warning System identifies new threats
Protection:
- Perimeter Security—enabled by Akonix L7 Enforcer, which enforces policy and provides blocking and alerting of unauthorized IM or peer-to-peer use on corporate networks complemented by the L7 Remote Security Agent™—the only protection available for off-network PC's and laptops where employees circumvent IM management gateways.
- Gateway Security—L7 Enterprise Server, the most deployed IM security product in the world, provides gateway security by filtering all IM traffic for content, viruses, spyware, worms, and inappropriate use.
- URL Challenge-Response—protects against social engineering attacks and 'URL poisoning', the hiding of a live and dangerous hyperlink behind what appears to be a legitimate URL. Unlike other challenge-response security, which uses static passwords or privacy-invading re-directs, the Akonix challenge-response requires human intelligence and cannot be defeated by a bot or other automated attack
Containment:
- Message Rate Throttling—shuts down IM sessions in the event that a single user ID attempts to send more messages per second than any human could normally send
- L7 IM Sentry—added into each user's 'buddy list' when the IM user logs in. When the IM Sentry receives a message containing an unknown URL, it alerts the IT administrator and puts the URL on a list of disallowed Web addresses, while L7 Enterprise prevents any further propagation of the message. Any future IM traffic containing the URL is automatically blocked once it is in the disallow list.
Log, report and bill back for usage
- Robust logging - capture entire conversations and key message statistics, such as network, user name and network identity
- Comprehensive reporting - generate usage reports by group or domain to bill back business units for IM access or account activity
Leverage existing network infrastructure
- Integrate with Microsoft ISA firewalls - plug into existing firewalls to route traffic to L7 Enterprise
- Plug into archiving platforms – The L7 Enterprise module for public IM captures IM conversations for archiving in all of the leading email archival platforms. Keep all electronic messaging compliant with laws and regulations by integrating IM archiving with email archiving. (* denotes formal technology partners)
- C2C Archive One*
- CA Message Manager
- EMC EmailXtender*
- Fortiva
- HP Integrated Archive Platform (IAP)*
- Intradyn*
- Iron Mountain Active Email Archiving*
- Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive*
- Quest Software
- Symantec Enterprise Vault*
- ZANTAZ Digital Safe*
- ZL Unified Archive
Ecosystem Friendly
- Utilize existing IM clients - allow employees to continue to use the application clients they access today, such as AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger
- Require no desktop touch - deploy with simple network change without any access to the employee desktop
Prevent unauthorized use of IM
- Block unauthorized access - stop employees from inadvertently or intentionally circumventing IM management
- Set policies to ensure that employees use only authorized IM networks and business IM identities
