We thought that we had seen just about every approach to extrusion prevention until we opened this box. CWAT (cybercrime, warning, alert, termination - pronounced "see-wat") is equally complicated to install and understand. This is a product that has taken insider-threat monitoring to extremes, and the result is a system that covers all the bases and is scalable to 12,000 users.
Deployment of user machine agents is a snap and can be automated. The system - a set of software modules - is comprised of an endpoint monitor, server-based network access control and a central management system. CWAT uses a Microsoft SQL Server database, which must be set up first.
There is just about nothing this product cannot do in terms of extrusion prevention. It covers content, files, email, peripherals and pretty much any extrusion vector you might have in your enterprise. It also supports its own encryption and digital rights management capabilities. To think of CWAT as just an extrusion prevention product would sell it short.
However, all this power comes at the price of complexity. Intelligent Wave addresses that with pre-made batch files to install each nodule, including the SQL database.
Documentation is extensive and includes a video tutorial. The supplier generally provides an engineer to assist with setting up a newly purchased system. After working through the product we can see why. Even with the setup batch files, there is a lot to do to get this suite working. But once up and running, it is a solid performer.
We were disappointed with the website. There is very little beyond sales material on the site, and we could not find the usual customer support portal. Support is available, according to Intelligent Wave, during office hours in the US, but the website is unclear about how to obtain this support, which is priced at 15 per cent of installed system cost.
The product is priced reasonably, the full-featured package starting at £18,745 for a perpetual licence for ten terminals, with two-year licences available for larger numbers of seats.