IP Protection, Secure Collaboration, 
and Massive Scalability

The company had previously relied on access controls to protect data, further restricting access to sensitive material was not possible. Employees needed the information to perform their jobs, and the attempted breach was by a trusted user. Any solution had to provide authorized users with unencumbered access to IP, while monitoring data use to ensure compliance with corporate policies.

Critical Success Factors

• Enable knowledge workers to share sensitive data globally by group and need 
• Automatic encryption of sensitive data when shared by email or copied to a removable drive 
• Real time alerting for Incident Response Teams and forensic reporting 
• Allow users with elevated privilege to perform system maintenance without exposing critical data 
• Scalability to deploy across 100,000 endpoints globally

The Solution 

Fortra™’s Digital Guardian® collaborated with the company to identify systems where IP was created, used, and stored - then used the deep visibility provided by the Digital Guardian agent to both verify and validate their assumptions. Endpoint agents monitored the data and enforced the organization’s policies in real time across local hard drives/USB devices, file servers, and burned to CD/DVD. The visibility further extended to uploads, email, printing, and screenshots. 

Having a comprehensive view of data, the customer implemented a hybrid content and context based classification program. Context classification was used for the discovery and automatic classification of files, as data was created, based on source application, server, file path, file type, and user identity, among the 200+ contextual factors available. Content-based classification was used based on keywords, regular expressions, document similarity, and pattern or dictionary matching. 

Digital Guardian provided the company with policy-driven, automated data controls to allow collaboration between business units, balanced against the risk posed by a specific activity. These controls range from prompting users for justification, automated encryption, or blocking. All actions around classified data are logged for further analysis and investigation as needed. If critical policies are violated, alerts are automatically escalated to incident response teams for immediate actions.