Everywhere you go these days every body is talking about the latest and greatest tools for securing the network and encrypting your data, but you have to ask if any of these efforts are dealing with anything more than the symptoms of the problem.

We're spending billions of dollars a year on firewalls, intrusion protection systems and the like. And we're just now starting to figure out how encrypt our data on drives so that should anybody gain access to them the data is essentially useless.

But all of this effort adds substantial overhead to the managing of information technology while do nothing to address how we make the actual act of using a computer on the network more secure.

One vendor that is trying to take that challenge on is TrustWare out of Mountain View, Calif. What TrustWare has done is create a 9MB download that can be installed on any machine that isolates every session on a machine and, more importantly, all the applications being accessed over the Internet. Effectively this means that any attack made against a user will interacting with live data is confined to that session. When the session is terminated, so is the attack because what Trustware does is essentially create a virtual copy of the registration and the file system. When running live, the data that is being touched never actually interacts with the actual registry and file system on the physical machine.

To some folks this may seem reminiscent of a company called Green Border that Google acquired a couple of years ago. The similarity comes from the fact that a lot of the folks at TrustWare can trace their careers back to Green Border.

Unfortunately, Google hasn't done much of anything with the Green Border technology. Worse yet, Microsoft hasn't done anything to address this issue either.

The reason for all this is that as an industry we seem to be far too focused on making money from treating the symptoms of various security issues as opposed to looking for an actual cure. TrustWare may not have the necessary weight to push is approach into mainstream Web computing, but anybody who is tired of spending time and money cleaning up after end users that are never going to fully cognizant of all the potential security threats that can harm them might want to take a hard look at TrustWare.

It costs a whopping $39.95 so when you stack that up against the rest of the security budget in terms of not only products bought but people needed to manage them, TrustWare could pay for itself within say the first say 60 minutes of installation.