The storage or should I say security market is really interesting right now. It appears that storage and security are converging as fast if not faster than IP and storage. The trend was initiated by Symantec’s acquisition of Veritas for 13 billion and now EMC’s acquisition of RSA Security for 2.1 billion. It’s not just the big boys making the crossing over security company SonicWall is dabbling in the storage space. SonicWall is breaking into the storage market with a solution focused on backup and recovery. The SonicWall appliance is targeted at the SMB space and provides features like CDP, file versioning, SQL support, exchange support and bare metal recovery at an extremely affordable price.

It remains to be seen what EMC will do with RSA Security but I can see key management and products like Reporting and Compliance Manager being leveraged very quickly. With all eyes on data security and compliance the acquisition of RSA puts EMC in the role of innovator in a sector that is very hot.

The the RSA technology should provide EMC a huge advantage to begin to architect end-to-end solutions where data security and chain of custody can be guaranteed. Combining key authentication with logging tools like Network Intelligence or SenSage for security event management could provide a level of data security that the data security market desperately needs.

Finally one has to wonder what this will mean for data security appliance makers who rely on EMC as a significant source of revenue. How long will it be before EMC leverages the RSA technology to embedded data encryption.

-RJB