abstract:Deep Content Inspection (DCI) is a form of network filtering that examines an entire file or MIME object as it passes an inspection point, searching for viruses, spam, data loss, key words or other content level criteria. Deep Content Inspection is considered the evolution of Deep Packet Inspection with the ability to look at what the actual content contains instead of focusing on individual or multiple packets.
Born as an IPS solution NetASQ rapidly leveraged their ability to do deep packet inspection, (or, as IDC terms it, complete contentinspection) to apply policies based not just on source-destination-port, but on content of assembled packet streams.