Symantec Releases Security Software for Enterprise Instant Messaging

Symantec Corp. has announced Symantec IM Manager 8.0, a secure instant messaging (IM) and real-time communications (RTC) management solution that enables organisations to control the use of public IM services and enterprise RTC platforms and manage compliance with legal and corporate governance policies.

According to Symantec, despite its high-risk profile, IM delivers significant business value by transforming the way in which employees communicate and collaborate. Therefore, organisations must keep messaging systems and data both secure and readily available. Symantec IM Manager 8.0 provides new proactive threat protection and remediation to secure the real-time communications infrastructure against external threats such as worms, spam, viruses, phishing and other unwanted content. It provides the industry’s only behaviour-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 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). It offers leading support for all major public IM networks and enterprise platforms, including AOL Instant Messenger, GoogleTalk, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, as well as enterprise IM offerings such as Microsoft Live Communications Server, IBM/Lotus Sametime and Jabber.

The software also provides fully integrated management and compliance archiving for corporate policy enforcement, human resources, legal risk management and regulatory compliance requirements, including Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), National Association for Securities Dealers (NASD), Sarbanes Oxley and Gramm Leach Bliley.