Sarah Carter. channels and marketing director with FaceTime, told Infosecurity that the extension to the USG's security capabilities makes it the first in the industry to cover blogs, wikis and social networking portals.

For heavily regulated industries such as the financial sector, schools and government agencies, she said, the new content control security functionality in USG 3.0 will ease concerns over compliance and data leakage via Web 2.0 services.

Nick Sears, vice president of EMEA with FaceTime, said that, until now, organisations have simply controlled and logged real-time communication applications such as instant messaging, where the native application resides on the desktop.

"With the growth of web-based instant messaging, webmail, blogs and social networks, it is now necessary to control other content posted to the web from within the organisation", he said.

"Users will continue to bring Web 2.0 applications into enterprise networks and IT managers can either try to lock down the network, or they can secure these applications and reap the benefits of social media collaboration without losing control."

Along with the new content control security features, FaceTime has enhanced the dashboard interface of USG to support a birds-eye view of user behaviour across multiple Web 2.0 sessions, as well as integrating anti-virus scanning to the firmware.

The company said USG 3.0 can be integrated with a web / FTP proxy server, such as Bluecoat, through an ICAP-based connector or deployed in simple pass-by mode - a plug and play deployment which requires no change to existing network configurations.

FaceTime has posted a video demonstration of its USG 3.0 capabilities to its website.