The market is currently dominated by smaller players, but other vendors are entering. For example, CipherTrust Inc. and Proofpoint Systems Inc., which sell e-mail content filtering products, have announced new offerings, says Burke. "Any space that grows by 70 percent is going to attract the established security players," he says.

So, should you wait to buy? Not necessarily, says Burke. Many organizations don't want to buy different point products to protect each communication channel, he says.

Using application-specific tools isn't necessarily a bad idea, however, especially if your organization already has them, says Henry. The need for multi-protocol content-filtering tools may be at least partly mitigated by existing security mechanisms. Users that have outbound e-mail content filtering, URL blocking and instant messaging controls in place already have some protection, although such tools don't generally do the same level of linguistic analysis.

You should also consider the possibility of conflicts with other security tools. Network-based content-monitoring software can detect encrypted files and interpret them in some contexts, but it can't read the content. That puts it at odds with other outbound content management tools that encrypt documents, such as e-mail security applications and enterprise rights management software, says Henry.

Fredriksen says that although Vontu is important, it's still just one piece of a larger strategy that includes an overlapping set of controls that Raymond James uses to combat insider threats. "This augments the intrusion-detection and firewall systems we have that control and block specific ports," he says. "It's just a piece. It's not the Holy Grail."