Actiance Vantage
Secure and Enable Real-Time and Unified Communications
Vantage is the de facto platform for granular security, policy controls, and compliance features for real-time and unified communications (UC) - providing management for the widest variety of UC and real-time communications platforms - including Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Office Communications Server (OCS), IBM Sametime, Cisco Unified Presence (CUP), public instant messaging (IM) platforms such as Windows Live Messenger and Skype, Web conferencing, and industry-focused networks such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Pivot, and YellowJacket.
Vantage is used by the world's largest firms to ensure security, management, and compliance for UC - from presence and instant messaging to conferencing and voice - to safely enhance business productivity and responsiveness without compromising network security.
Vantage also maintains an integrated trust relationship with Unified Security Gateway (USG), enabling organizations to ensure that only sanctioned access to real-time communications is allowed.
Secure and Enable Real-time and Unified Communications
Today’s enterprise communications environment is highly heterogeneous, consisting not only of the enterprise Unified Communications (UC) platform, but typically also several public instant messaging (IM) networks – driving a requirement to securely enable the corporate UC platform, federated connections with external parties and networks – alongside those publicly available networks that do not currently connect with the corporate messaging platform.
Security Management & Compliance Threats and Challenges
Despite collaborative environments such as Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), IBM Sametime, and Cisco Unified Presence (CUP), users continue to utilize publicly available real-time communications tools such as Yahoo, AIM, Google Talk, Windows Live or Skype, resulting in a typically heterogeneous environment requiring a security and compliance solution that addresses the whole real-time communications spectrum, which brings a number of challenges.
- Data Leakage
- Inbound Threats
- Compliance & eDiscovery
- User Behavior
Key Features:
- Support for Microsoft Lync and OCS, IBM Sametime, Cisco Unified Presence 8, and all major public IM networks
- Ethical wall, custom disclaimers, file transfer support for IBM Sametime
- IBM Sametime announcement auditing
- OCS CAC controls for resource allocation
- “Poison Room” policies for ethical walls enforcement, archiving and reporting in Microsoft Live Meeting
- Compliance, Security and Control for Skype
- Support for BlackBerry PIN and SMS messaging
- Support for the import of Bloomberg, Pivot, Thomson Reuters Messenger, and YellowJacket data
- Support for real-time monitoring of Reuters IM traffic, including chat rooms, file sharing, and screen capture sharing
- Compliance disclaimers, ethical walls, archiving and auditing for OCS Group Chat
- Prevent data leakage over IM and UC platforms through content filtering and regular expressions
- Integrate with corporate directory services to utilize and control communications at global, group and employee level
- Virus scanning of file transfers using existing AV implementation or via Sophos anti-virus module
- Block zero-day IM-based worm and virus attacks
- Guaranteed 100% accurate binary archiving of all IM for compliance or e-Discovery
- Integrate with Actiance Insight for analytics and reporting
Security
- Day-zero worm blocking of virus attacks that use real-time communications channels
- Virus Scan file transfers, including those over OCS, Sametime, and Cisco Unified Presence, using existing AV installations
- Block external threats and SpIM at the gateway with perimeter deployment options for OCS, Sametime, and Cisco Unified Presence
- Block file transfer or allow (archiving if required) with imposed file size limits
- Patent pending anti-SpIM technology protects bandwidth
- Support for securing Skype IM chat, preventing file transfer over Skype, scan content of IM
- Prevent loss of intellectual
property and confidential
information by:
- Routing employee communications over public IM networks internally,
- Blocking messages using keyword watch list, advanced keyword patterns and full regular expressions
- Content scanning of file transfers of popular file types, including Microsoft Office and other applications
- Protecting and blocking encrypted files and controlling what file types can be sent internally or externally
Management
- Secure, intuitive Web-based access to configuration functions by authorized personnel
- Manage file transfer, collaboration (e.g., audio/video conferencing, games, VoIP), and other client privileges at the company, group and user levels for all real-time communications services
- Associate employee IDs in the corporate directory with IM buddy names
- IP-based controls enforce policies based on endpoint IP addresses
- Real-time usage reports and graphical monitoring plus integration with Actiance Insight
- Advanced controls for AIM clients for end-to-end policy enforcement and better user experience
- Full management, security and compliance support for BlackBerry users
- Audit within OCS, Sametime, and Cisco environments
- Microsoft Live Meeting event and activity support, configurable Poison Room settings
- OCS Call Admission Control (CAC) - control audio, video and collaboration sessions
- Capture OCS session data and custom location information
- Policy setting by domain based groups, group-to-group policies and also “registered nonemployees”.
- Granular inter-group policies
Compliance
- 100% guaranteed accurate binary archiving of all real-time communications, including user sign on/off history, multiparty chat participation and file transfers
- Microsoft Lync and OCS Group Chat policy management
- Monitor PIN and SMS messages through BlackBerry Enterprise Server
- Real-time monitoring of Thomson Reuters Messenger traffic, including multi-party chat, chat rooms, and file sharing
- Bloomberg, Pivot, Thomson Reuters Messenger, and YellowJacket import capability
- Customizable chat disclaimers
- Auditing of Sametime announcements
- IM compliance for messages exchanged over Skype with granular management of Skype clients and features
- Auditing of Microsoft OCS/Lync events for audio, video and Live Meeting events, including start, end, participant, join and leave events
- Assign and enforce regulatory compliance features at the company, group and individual employee levels
- Facilitate segregation of roles and tasks based on functional responsibilities of an individual
- Configure ethical boundaries to restrict intergroup and interorganization contact
- Sophisticated workflow process with content monitoring, review cycles and custom search queries
- 360-degree audit of all users including system administrators and content reviewers
- Advanced text search for easy and efficient retrieval of IM transcripts for e-Discovery
- Seamless integration with common email archive and WORM storage systems
- File transfer archival support, includes OCS, Sametime, and Cisco
- Prevent data tampering with a checksum of time-stamped messages, ensuring exported conversations match recorded conversations
- Email alerts and notifications to ensure records retention and facilitate ease of retrieval
- Facility for reviewer to delete personal messages from transcripts
- Parlano MindAlign 2007 persistent chat transcript import capability
Extension and Integration
- Integrates with corporate database applications, email compliance, archiving, and WORM storage systems
- APIs for extending real-time event
management capabilities to:
- Manage IM from other corporate applications
Enterprise-Grade Deployment
- Flexible Operating System and Database deployment architecture
- On-premise or multi-tenant deployment options, with hosting management through common infrastructure and delegated administration
- Capture any language, includes double byte support
- Fail-over with load-balance available among redundant and corporate proxy servers
- VMware deployment capabilities
- High availability for multi-site deployment
Deployment:
Secure and Enable Real-time and Unified Communications
Vantage™ provides granular security, compliance features and policy controls for Unified Communications platforms such as Microsoft OCS, IBM Sametime, and Cisco Unified Presence, alongside publicly available instant messaging networks, Web conferencing and industry-focused IM communities like Thomson Reuters Messenger, Bloomberg and YellowJacket.
Vantage is designed to meet an organization’s security, management and compliance requirements for real-time communications and supports all major government and industry regulations – from FISMA to FINRA, SEC, FRCP, Sarbanes-Oxley, MiFID and FERC.
Delivering protection for real-time communications channels against viruses, malware and closing the zero-day gap, Vantage also provides granular content filtering, and archiving of all conversations ensuring an audit trail for data leak prevention, compliance and eDiscovery.
System Requirements:
Supported Applications:
- Unified Communications: Microsoft LCS 2005, OCS 2007 and 2007 R2, Lync Server 2010, IBM Sametime 8.5 and Sametime Advanced 8.5.1, Cisco Unified Presence 8.0, Cisco Jabber XCP, MindAlign
- Professional Community Networks: Bloomberg, Pivot, Reuters, YellowJacket
- Public Instant Messaging: Windows Live Messenger, MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, iChat, and Skype
- Web Conferencing: WebEx, Live Meeting
Software Requirements:
- Microsoft Windows 2000/2003/2008 Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 or ES 4.0
- Microsoft SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, or Oracle 9i, 10g or 11g (on a separate machine)
- Also supported on VMware
Hardware Requirements:
- Pentium 4, 2 GHz CPU or higher recommended
- Network Interface Card (10/100BaseTx or Gigabit)
- 2 GB of RAM
- 40 GB of available hard disk space
Documentation:
Download the Actiance Vantage Datasheet (PDF).