Patent ID: 8561189

Claim:
A method, comprising: examining a data stream on a network, the data stream comprising a plurality of portions of data, to determine the presence of one or more predetermined characteristics associated with at least one of the portions of data; characterizing at least one of the portions of data based upon the at least one of the portions of data exhibiting a predetermined combination of the predetermined characteristics, the predetermined combination of the predetermined characteristics being related to the level of sensitivity of the at least one of the portions of data; and distributing the portions of the data stream into a plurality of different channels based on the characterizing, selection of said channels in which to distribute the portions of the data stream being determined by tags attached to at least one of the portions of data, the tags including at least one or more of the following: 802.1 VLAN, GMPLS, MPLS, light tags, data tags, overall level of trust tags, protocol tags, sensitivity tags, data value tags, or component specific tags.