Symantec announces its new Information Risk Management (IRM) strategy and products today at GITEX Technology Week, which it says will help organisations to secure and manage unstructured information.

A recent Symantec survey of IT leaders shows that unstructured information is not only a major driver of rising IT storage costs, but also a root cause of security and business challenges that stem from failure to manage information risk.

The survey also finds that the majority of organisations are experiencing a greater than 30% yearly growth in email, with many organisations reporting upwards of 95% of email as spam.

"With spam messages continuing to grow in both sheer quantity and complexity, email administrators need perimeter protection that brings them confidence by prioritising their legitimate email, while starving spammers," says Francis deSouza, senior vice president, IRM, Symantec.

Symantec is revealing the details of three new products, which are at the core of its IRM strategy: Symantec Brightmail Gateway 8.0 (SBM), Symantec Data Loss Prevention 9.0 (SDLP) and its Symantec Enterprise Vault 8.0 (SEV).SBM offers enhanced sender reputation technology and improved management features to deliver inbound protection, outbound control and simple management, and administration with reporting and granular controls.

SDLP broadens coverage of endpoint events, simplifies its management and enhances data discovery capabilities.

SEV significantly reduces the costs of storing unstructured information through a combination of advancements to its data de-duplication, electronic discovery features and through associated energy cost savings.

"The combination of these products allows Symantec to deliver a cohesive strategy to organisations looking to address the challenges of securing and managing their unstructured information," says Jon Oltsik, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

"Symantec IRM addresses major drivers of rising IT costs and gets at the root cause of not only security, but also business challenges."

The new IRM range will be available in early 2009.