Symantec Corporation today announced an updated version of its Symantec Data Loss Prevention suite, designed to help businesses prevent data leaks in their changing IT environments.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention 10.5, the latest version of Symantec's market-leading data security suite, enables the use of social media while guarding against data loss, protects information in private clouds and helps organisations take ownership of unstructured data, such as documents, spreadsheets and email, a company statement said.

"Information is today's most critical business asset and traditional boundaries for it no longer exist," said Symantec India Managing Director Vishal Dhupar. "Constantly evolving IT environments drive the need for new data protections. To protect information, Symantec must go where the data goes."

Social media is being increasingly used in business for collaboration and communication and Symantec said that 84 per cent of CIOs and CISOs considered social networking sites a serious threat to their security, as per its 2010 State of Enterprise Security study.

To enable the use of social media while addressing this threat, the Symantec Data Loss Prevention suite has enhanced compatibility with Web 2.0 sites, such as Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Meebo, to stop the flow of sensitive data.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention also minimises IT support costs by providing a more transparent web experience for end-users that seamlessly prevents data exposure without confusing the user with broken links or error messages, it said.