Cormier focuses on e-mail -- all FTP, Web mail and instant messaging traffic is blocked -- so he can turn on blocking without worrying about performance. But he says false positives have been a problem at Fidelity Bancshares because some account numbers match legitimate ZIP codes or phone numbers. Creating an exception would leave those account numbers vulnerable, so users have been trained to send communications with that information as secure messages.

Mark Rizzo, vice president of operations and platform engineering at Perpetual Entertainment Inc. in San Francisco, learned in a previous job the consequences of not protecting intellectual property. "I have been on the side of things disappearing and showing up at competitors," he says. The start-up online game developer deployed Tablus' Content Alarm to remedy the problem. Rizzo uses it to look for suspicious activity, such as large files that are moving outside of the corporate LAN. Now that the basic policies and rules have been set, the system doesn't require much ongoing maintenance, he says. But Rizzo says he doesn't use blocking because he would need to spend significant amounts of time creating more policies in order to avoid false positives.

While companies in highly regulated industries can justify investing in outbound content monitoring and blocking tools, other organizations may have to sharpen their pencils to justify the cost. "These are very expensive solutions to deploy," says Henry.

Fredriksen, who built a system to support 16,000 users, says that for a setup with about 20,000 users, "you're in the $200,000 range, easily."

Prices range from $6 to $40 per user, depending on the size of the deployment, says Burke. However, companies in less regulated industries are increasingly interested despite the costs. The reason: They're aware that the consequences of intellectual property loss, releases of customer information or inappropriate leakage of financial data can be very damaging. Timing It Right