The VP-II S vascular hand scanner provided by Identica fits perfectly into our look forward for the year. This device takes biometrics to a whole new level.

If you are trying to log into a network protected by Bradford Networks' NAC Director, you'll have an agent on your computer or you won't login. If you have an agent, you'll be sent exactly where policy allows you to go and nowhere else.

Like all of our selections for this issue, Passlogix told us that they were innovators because they look at problems in new ways. What is more important is not that they look at problems in new ways, but how they do it. The "how" in the case of Passlogix is the real differentiator.

When the phrase identity management comes up it is almost enough to make any administrator cringe. Between managing users, making sure they are in the right groups and have the right permissions, keeping the system up to date, and the many other headaches that come along with managing identity, most administrators would rather do pretty much anything else.

Every company — especially the ones we have selected this month — couples vision with philosophy. The simple philosophy that Entrust embraces is: if multifactor authentication is to be the wave of the future, it must be affordable and manageable without losing its effectiveness.

There may — will, according to Mu Security — come a time when signature-based vulnerability assessment by itself is no longer a viable testing option.

Iconsider the term "ethical hacking" an oxymoron, but it has become a part of the information assurance lexicon whether I agree or not. However, the practical fact is that true penetration testing is not hacking in any form whatever.

Every now and then we see, as Monty Python used to say "...something completely different." The RazorThreat Threat Analysis Console is just such a product. The TAC, as RazorThreat refers to its product, analyzes inter-domain communications and determines through policy whether the communication is allowed or may be indicative of an attack.

SIM/SEM — security information management or security event management — often is characterized as being log correlation and analysis. LogLogic entered the market as an early player and focused on log management. That is still, five years later, where the company puts its efforts.

Occasionally one gets to see a set of products whose only connection is that they take really hard problems in a particular application space and address them in remarkably innovative ways. These are the solutions to hard problems that everyone says you can't do, but you have to do it anyway.

The unified threat management (UTM) market is a fast growing segment of the security market and vendors are trying to cram more and more security into a single device. The major problem here is that most vendors take a best of breed approach and bring in third-party technology. This is where eSoft separates itself from the bunch.

It's just an intrusion prevention system (IPS), right? Well, not exactly. NitroSecurity is another of those companies that we've been watching for a long time. Initially, its claim to fame was a blazingly fast backend database. It provided that to developers of some very demanding applications, including IDS/IPS apps. The database platform shines when there are huge amounts of data to process without losing any.

Wireless is not the future. It is now. Organizations are demanding wireless connectivity and IT departments are struggling to deploy it, while security managers are pushing back hard until security concerns for this pervasive technology can be addressed. The issues are management and security.

We have characterized GTB Inspector as "email security," but, really, that requires a bit of rethinking about what we mean by the term. There are, as everyone knows, a lot of aspects to email security and Inspector addresses one of the most important: data leak prevention.

In discussing innovation with people from PGP, we made a very interesting discovery. What we classically think of as PGP encryption actually is only a small part of the view that the company has of the product line and the mission of the company.

A major challenge in today's large networks is the build-up of unseen malware, spyware and botnets. The Mi5 Networks Webgate is a tool that helps bring these problems to the surface and remediates them without disruption of network traffic flow.

As we pointed out earlier in this month's issue, eSoft has the UTM for everyone. However, in some cases, a UTM is not what is needed. In some cases the customer's current environment already has a firewall and VPN, but is without a way to manage content and usage policies. This is where the ThreatWall appliance comes in.

Years ago, when BigFix was a new entry in the market, it was thought of as a patch management product. Over time the system has evolved into a suite of products that BigFix characterizes as enabling "organizations to see, change and enforce the IT policies of computing devices in real-time at global scale."

It's not enterprise security management anymore. According to visionaries from Archer Technologies, the old notion of enterprise security management has given way to risk and compliance management. For years IT risk managers were treated almost as second-class citizens because IT risk was viewed as a very small part of the overall risk picture.