There was a part lacking in the "self-defending network" Cisco has been touting for three years now : Data Leak Prevention (DLP). This has now been fixed at the 2008 RSA Conference, earlier this month in San Francisco, as EMC and Cisco announced extending their partnership to DLP.

Both companies have an ongoing relationship based on the integration of RSA's crypto solutions (RSA being EMC's security division). Announced in 2007, the deal spreads across storage, servers, network and security. Today's announcement will bring RSA's DLP solutions within Cisco Security Agent. The solution is Cisco's endpoint client that takes charge of personal firewalling, Host-based IPS, and NAC (Network Access Control).

RSA's DLP comes from Tablus, bought in 2007. Since then, it has been extended with Infoscape's non-structured data indexing engine (also bought by EMC). With that announcement RSA thus brings Cisco its ability to discover and classify sensitive data. Cisco's agent will finally be at the heart of an endpoint security solution much like what the competition offers (Symantec, IBM, Check Point, McAfee, Trend Micro).

For EMC, the sweet part of the deal is getting an endpoint. "DLP needs agents. And Cisco will now help us in deploying them. Cisco customers will also benefit from our  indexing and classification solution and they will be able to access our management console", says Art Coviello, EMC's Executive VP and President of RSA.

But if this deal indeed brings Cisco up to speed with DLP, Current Analysis Senior Analyst Charlotte Dunlap find it laking an email component, especially since Cisco could have tied it with its Ironport secure email offering. "Many customers see email has a prime data leak medium and it makes sense to add DLP to email security", says Dunlap. But even without Ironport, email will not be totally forgotten since EMC's DLP solution will be integrated with Cisco's Registered Envelope Service within the Nexus 7000 switches. 

Apart from DLP, Cisco and EMC plan on integrating the Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Media Encryption with RSA's Key Manager. The former is a crypto solution dedicated to tapes and virtual libraries. It should be available in may 2008.

Lastly, both companies will collaborate on PCI (Payment Card Industry) through a new Application Control engine in Cisco's Lean Retail, a solution that already benefits of RSA's PCI compliance tools.