But Starry didn't give up. He discovered that was willing to update its StealthWatch network behavior analysis monitoring gear to support Nortel, and he brought Lancope engineers together with Nortel ones to make it happen. This didn't come cheap: Starry says there's so much additional stress put on switches made to export every session out to a security collector that the switches had to be boosted with special hardware cards that cost upwards of US$100,000.

But the month-long development work -- which helped Nortel correct a bug in its code -- was successful, and the security monitoring is working as envisioned, identifying unwanted applications and network usage, Starry says. "With Lancope, we can tell if someone is trying to access that fund-raising server, for instance," says Starry, noting the comprehensive internal monitoring is a requirement to meet the demands of audit committees.

Orange County's e-mail encryption plan

For Lucich, the CISO and enterprise architect for the Orange County government, the issue was finding security vendors in the encryption and e-mail security arena to help meet the requirement that the county's 23 agencies, with their 24,000 or so employees, encrypt e-mail containing sensitive data, such as Social Security numbers or financial information.

Lucich says after a review of encryption possibilities, the county favored the public-key certificate system in Voltage Security's , which doesn't require digital certificate distribution. But the county needed to find a way to send all the county e-mail through a common point to be subject to content inspection, as well as blocking inbound spam.