It has been reported that Sophos will be giving away programs to prevent loss of sensitive information from organisations under the banner of DLP. Sophos, who purchased Utimaco a little over a year ago for their encryption technology will be distributing the programs to customers who have bought Sophos AV.

What is clearly a sales tactic, it will cause concern to the other vendors of DLP products such as Symantec and McAfee who have traditionally charged customers large amounts for their products. It does introduce an important new turn that DLP is an adjunct to AV rather than a fundamental part of corporate security. Will all the other vendors be forced to follow suit? I hope not as the issue is that customers who take up the Sophos offer, will falsely believe that they are protected when clearly they will not.  As can be seen by the number of organisations that have fallen victim to the Conficker virus, AV can be disabled but a decent DLP product would have stopped.

I hope that other DLP vendors will give away DLP as serious customers will realise that you get what you pay for and leave the field clear for serious DLP vendor products and support models to match.