EMC Enhances Sharepoint Security and Availability

RSA® CONFERENCE 2009, San Francisco, CA - April 21, 2009 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), and its security division, RSA, today announced new solutions that help customers simplify management and ensure the utmost security for Microsoft® SharePoint® environments. As organizations put SharePoint services to greater use, SharePoint repositories begin to contain confidential and mission-critical information that must be available and secure to meet business needs. The powerful combination of products from EMC and its security division coupled with EMC’s deep expertise in Microsoft environments provides organizations with solutions to help better secure critical information, identities and infrastructure while achieving security and availability of the SharePoint platform. These solutions are engineered to provide validated architectures and best practices to accelerate time to deployment, deliver predictable results, and achieve improved performance.

As organizations see SharePoint deployments rapidly expand, the platform becomes a more strategic and valuable asset that requires closer governance and an ability to identify sensitive data for security and compliance purposes. In fact a recent survey by RSA revealed 53% of US respondents would likely invest in third party technology to help solve the problem of data discovery within SharePoint services. Additionally 47% of US respondents ranked identifying sensitive information within SharePoint sites as most important.

According to Forrester Research, “Without appropriate guidance organizations struggle with SharePoint proliferation that manifests in the creation of thousands of SharePoint workspaces or in unsanctioned — or unknown — uses of the numerous areas of functionality SharePoint offers,” (“SharePoint Success Will Take a Village,” Forrester Research, Inc., June 2008).

The RSA Solution for Microsoft SharePoint addresses an array of security issues that arise within a large and distributed SharePoint environment. By enabling customers to gain a clear view on the current SharePoint hierarchy, as well as where sensitive data exist, RSA provides organizations the ability to more effectively evaluate their security and governance posture in order to mitigate risk and gain the most from the company’s SharePoint investment.

As part of the RSA Solution, the new RSA® Secure View tool for Microsoft SharePoint provides customers with a hierarchical view of the SharePoint environment from servers to files within SharePoint sites. The tool is designed to also reveal which users have access to resources within the SharePoint deployment and eases the process of identifying where sensitive data resides within the SharePoint environment. With this insight, customers can then more effectively develop a comprehensive risk remediation strategy.

“Protecting sensitive information is about more than discovering and managing the information itself. Organizations need to also manage access to that information. RSA Secure View tool for Microsoft SharePoint is engineered to reveal which users and groups have access to valuable information within the SharePoint environment and help to bridge the gap between business and security professionals to gain the most from the company’s investment in SharePoint services,” said Christopher Young, senior vice president of products at RSA. “Moreover, the solution is designed to help reduce implementation time and cost of ownership.”

In addition, the new RSA® DLP RiskAdvisor for Microsoft SharePoint service leverages RSA Data Loss Prevention Datacenter for automated discovery of sensitive information and provides a snapshot of potential exposure within the SharePoint environment. The result is the rapid identification of sensitive data on target SharePoint servers, sites and SharePoint infrastructure components. The RiskAdvisor service is engineered to encompass a high-level mapping of business functions to sensitive data helping to determine how that information was put at risk. Through the EMC Proven validation of RSA DLP Datacenter, this solution delivers these benefits at an enterprise-scale.

Coupled with RSA Secure View tool, the RSA DLP RiskAdvisor for Microsoft SharePoint service is designed to provide a holistic view of the SharePoint environment, the location of sensitive data, and potential areas of risk. After areas of risk are identified, customers often face the task of building an effective remediation strategy. To help customers more successfully address identified risk, RSA’s solution offers solution architectures and extensive technical documentation – including deployment and configuration guides – that enable customers to better understand how RSA security controls may be consistently applied across a SharePoint environment.

Core to security of Microsoft SharePoint is the ability to discover sensitive data. To support enterprise SharePoint security initiatives, EMC conducted rigorous testing of RSA DLP Datacenter to validate its ability to scale to meet the needs of large Microsoft SharePoint environments.

This scalable EMC Proven™ solution helps customers discover and protect sensitive information on SharePoint sites through integration of the RSA DLP Suite and Microsoft® Active Directory® Rights Management Services (AD-RMS). This solution is engineered to allow you to:

• Discover and classify information across a SharePoint 2007 environment
• Enforce information security policies on the SharePoint farm, leveraging the RSA DLP and Microsoft AD RMS integration
• Meet your data-oriented regulatory and compliance objectives, with robust alerting and reporting from the RSA DLP Enterprise Manager Dashboard
• Extract the value of the customer’s existing Microsoft Active Directory investment, while leveraging the strong RSA DLP/Microsoft partnership

This EMC Proven solution, enabled by EMC Symmetrix® storage systems and EMC SRDF® (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility), provides technical validation for SharePoint customers to implement high availability by achieving fast recovery from unplanned server failures, simplified restart from server failures, consistent failover and centralized management. Key customer benefits include:

• Management of diverse content and streamlined business processes for handling growing volumes of data
• Enterprise scalability and document collaboration
• Affordable, uniform high availability across an environment
• Protection of Microsoft Office SharePoint farm from a site disaster

EMC Consulting, a Microsoft Global System Integrator and 18-time Microsoft Partner of the Year winner, helps customers develop Microsoft SharePoint governance, compliance, and risk assessment strategies that incorporate RSA security measures. EMC’s deep Microsoft expertise and extensive knowledge of security best practices assure compliance and drive ROI for customer portal implementations for new deployments and extensions of existing Microsoft SharePoint implementations. EMC Consulting is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with ten competencies.

Further details on RSA’s SharePoint security survey, which covers both the United States and EMEA, along with complete details on the methodology, and further details on RSA’s solution are available at www.rsa.com/sharepoint.

Full press releases and resources based on RSA’s announcements and related initiatives at RSA Conference 2009 can be found online at www.rsa.com/rsaconference2009.

RSA’s information-centric security solutions and services will be featured in booth 1725 at RSA Conference 2009, April 20-24, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The RSA Partner Pavilion will be featured in booth 1737.