EMC Targets SharePoint Challenges

EMC and its security division, RSA, announced new solutions designed to simplify the management and ensure the security of Microsoft SharePoint environments. According to EMC, as SharePoint deployments rapidly expand, the platform becomes a more strategic and valuable asset that requires closer governance and the identification of sensitive data for security and compliance, issues that appear to resonate with SharePoint users. In a recent RSA survey, over half of U.S. respondents said they would likely invest in third-party data discovery technologies for SharePoint services and nearly that number ranked identifying sensitive information in SharePoint sites as a most important issue.

EMC's new RSA Solution for Microsoft SharePoint includes:

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. The resulting 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). Enabled by EMC's Symmetrix storage systems and SRDF (Symmetrix Remote Data Facility), the new EMC Proven Solution 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.Increasingly, companies recognize the value of placing information and computing resources directly into the hands of employees. But the continuing "localization" of IT also carries inherent challenges, particularly related to unstructured information, such as email and documents contained in business collaboration solutions like Microsoft's SharePoint.

One of SharePoint's greatest benefits -- its ability to support and enhance the autonomy of individual workers and work groups -- can also be a source of IT administration headaches. While SharePoint is remarkably easy to set-up and manage locally, businesses often face significant challenges in ascertaining what business information is contained in those repositories, where it resides, and who has access to it. Unsurprisingly, the larger a company is, the bigger those issues become.

These are the essential points that EMC's new RSA Solution for Microsoft SharePoint is designed to address. By providing a holistic view of the SharePoint environment and the location of sensitive data while identifying potential areas of risk, customers can leverage EMC's new solutions to build effective remediation strategies. In addition, the RSA solutions incorporate architectures and extensive technical documentation that enable customers to better understand how controls may be consistently applied across SharePoint environments -- critical points that help ensure customers continuing security.

In addition, EMC's Symmetrix/SRDF-based Proven Solution offers highly available, effective, secure and scalable options for the largest of enterprise customers, including those that wish to manage SharePoint-based data accrued and stored by tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees. For such organizations, maintaining the security and compliance of their SharePoint infrastructures is not a simple goal but a critical necessity. Overall, EMC's new RSA Solution for Microsoft SharePoint and its Proven Solution blend the best of existing and new innovative technologies into a secure offering able to meet the current and future needs of the most demanding enterprises.

— Charles King, President and Principal Analyst for research firm Pund-IT Inc. , focuses on business technology evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on vendors, their customers, and the greater IT marketplace.InformationWeek Analytics has published an independent analysis of the challenges around enterprise storage. Download the report here (registration required).