Symantec Corp.

Symantec Corp. has released Symantec IM Manager 8.0, which the Cupertino, Calif., company calls a secure instant messaging (IM) and real-time communications (RTC) management solution--one that enables organizations to control the use of public IM services and enterprise RTC platforms and manage compliance with legal and corporate governance policies. Symantec IM Manager is a key component of Symantec's Enterprise Messaging Management solution portfolio.

IDC estimates that enterprise IM will grow from 40 million users today to more than 140 million by 2009, which would make IM the fastest-growing communications medium of all time. The speed and scale of this growth has outpaced IT administrators' ability to deploy security and management solutions, providing a new avenue for malicious computer code.

To date, most corporate IM traffic remains unmonitored and unprotected, and the infection of one computer can result in the rapid proliferation of viruses, worms and spyware within corporate environments. The real-time nature of IM, combined with attacks that leverage social engineering techniques, make IM threats highly destructive and costly to an infrastructure.

Symantec IM Manager 8.0 provides new proactive threat protection and remediation that secures the real-time communications infrastructure against external threats such as worms, spam, viruses, phishing and other unwanted content. The company claims to provide "the industry's only behavior-based and network anomaly monitoring system to preempt IM threat outbreaks before they occur, while leveraging the largest real-time global community to identify and validate the most current IM threats."

Symantec IM Manager 8.0 also provides customers with innovative granular policy controls for all aspects of IM and real-time communications, including application sharing, file sharing, audio, video and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Web: www.symantec.com