Symantec said Monday that it will spend $350 million to purchase data leak prevention vendor Vontu, making it the latest security vendor to enter this new but crowded market. The acquisition is expected to close by year"s end, putting Symantec in competition with security vendors McAfee, Trend Micro, and Websense, all of whom have acquired data loss prevention companies of their own over the past year.
Vontu sells software that discovers sensitive information on the network and then prevents it from leaking out on laptops or storage devices. With state-mandated data-breach notification laws and new federal regulations making it increasingly important for companies to keep a lid on sensitive data, this kind of technology is becoming attractive to security vendors such as Symantec. Symantec has already been shipping Vontu"s software as an add-on to its Mail Security 8300 series appliances for the past year and a half.