Next, fingerprint your content so data...

... doesn't go where it isn't supposed to. "Unstructured data is where most proprietary corporate data is kept," says Sreekanth Ravi, CEO of Code Green Networks Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif. He points to source code, design documents, and merger and acquisition papers as examples. To help you keep tabs on that information, Code Green sells its $75,000 CI-1100 appliance, which does "deep-content fingerprinting" on information stored in more than 400 document formats, Ravi says. The so-called fingerprints are mathematical representations of the content that the CI-1100 can compare against information in data packets crossing your network. It's up to you to define how you want violations of content distribution policies handled. Currently, the CI-1100 can represent 1TB of content in 5GB of fingerprints, Ravi says. By year's end, he says, expect it to be able to manage 10TB of data in the same fingerprint footprint.

Protect app-to-app communications...

... with an automatic password tool. Applications often have hard-coded passwords stored so they can communicate with other applications. Making password changes to an application is often so cumbersome that they never get updated -- creating an obvious security problem. Robert Grapes, an enterprise product specialist at Cloakware Inc. in Vienna, Va., says his company's Server Password Manager software "eliminates having to hard-code passwords into applications." Version 2.5, available today, adds applications running on Windows servers to the software's existing support for Unix and Linux apps. It also includes Unix root-password management capabilities, among other improvements. Pricing starts at $1,000 per application managed.