Companies often ascribe success to "doing one thing and doing it right." That philosophy is working for Orchestria and its ECC (electronic communication control) solution, which concentrates on preventing sensitive data from leaving organizations through e-mail, Web mail, and related channels, including blogs.

Other data-leak prevention solutions grapple with contrasting technologies, such as in-line appliances and file crawlers. Orchestria protects with intelligent agents deployed to desktops and e-mail servers (Exchange and IBM Domino).

Moreover, Orchestria extracts messages and conversations from Lotus Notes.nsf, Exchange.pst, and instant message.msg files and integrates with EMC, Zantas, IBM, and Symantec storage management applications for historical investigation of unstructured data.

Impressive scalability

My test bed mirrored a typical enterprise: a network with Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange servers. I added the Orchestria central management server and a second server that handled policy enforcement.

In practice, you would likely install multiple policy engines at different points on your network for scalability, which is the best I've seen to date. Typical performance is 300 messages per second; Orchestria's largest production implementation monitors 275,000 users and processes 9 million messages per day (3,000 messages per second) with this distributed architecture.

Besides the agent approach, Orchestria touts its easy, ongoing maintenance and highly customized, accurate polices. I checked these statements using the Administration Console and Policy Editor. The claims held up, due to two things: First, policies adhere to an organizational hierarchy, which can be as complex as you need. Orchestria automatically synchronized Active Directory groups (LDAP import is also supported) with my policy hierarchy. This is especially important in large organizations where there can be hundreds of personnel changes each day; when a user moves from one group to another, his or her policies change automatically.

Second, Orchestria offers Policypaks covering violations involving regulatory noncompliance, corporate governance, and confidential security leakage. I was disappointed to find no Web front end to the server's policy administration management console or wizards, something most other solutions provide.

Still, after a little learning, I was traversing quickly through nodes within my hierarchy and changing policy definitions. For example, I selected a top-level group and used various menus to define new triggers within policies, as well as the action I wanted taken when the trigger criteria were satisfied. You can apply the same process all the way down to a specific person.

Policies, of course, are only good when accurately interpreted. Orchestria does this behind the scenes with a combination of various real-time message analysis tools, ranging from document classifiers (statistical analysis that looks for, say, dollar figures or dates) to semistructured analysis (looking for character patterns, such as Social Security numbers). The system extracts text from more than 200 file types.

Orchestria also applies contextual analysis to data found in file and message archives. Rather than just looking at e-mail attachments in a Notes database, Orchestria will consider other factors, such as number of message recipients, to determine whether it should be flagged as suspicious.

I ran Orchestria through approximately a dozen scenarios, sending messages through Outlook, Outlook Web Access, and Hotmail, and making blogger.com posts. All suspect messages were trapped successfully.

I was impressed with the system's flexibility. For instance, I tried to send a message externally that did not have the proper disclaimer; Orchestria provided instant feedback about the specific violation and gave me the opportunity to correct the problem. This feedback helps educate users about acceptable use, while providing a chance to correct the problem -- a process that should reduce the number of violations that must be reviewed.

Besides blocking with notification, the software can also warn users about a potential problem. For serious infractions, messages are quarantined for action by compliance officers.