Tips and Criteria for Assessing DLP Solutions

Organizations are finding that it’s more expensive than ever to pay for the wide-ranging costs of data breaches and yet that it’s increasingly difficult to mitigate the risks that would ideally prevent those breaches altogether.

The average cost of a data breach in the last year has soared to an all-time high of $4.35 million per breach according to IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach Report, and even breaches that were a result of accidental data loss reportedly cost organizations an average of $3.95 million. Complicating things further, there was a strong correlation found between remote working and the cost of a data breach, where more employees working remotely was associated with higher data breach costs.

The same report also suggests that organizations can take meaningful steps toward preventing breaches and lowering the cost of breaches that do occur.

According to the report, organizations that prioritized risks, threats, and impacts based on risk quantification techniques had an average breach cost of $3.30 million, over $1 million less than the average cost of a breach and $2.10 million less than breaches stemming from not using risk quantification. Perhaps most notably, the report suggests that organizations can significantly reduce the cost of a breach by protecting their data in cloud environments, monitoring endpoints, and gaining better visibility into the movement of their data.

With this in mind, finding and implementing a data loss prevention (DLP) solution that can accomplish all of the above is more crucial now than it’s ever been before.

KEY CRITERIA FOR EVALUATING DATA LOSS PREVENTION SOLUTIONS

GigaOm’s latest Radar for DLP Report recognizes that “leading vendors are responding with levels of innovation that provide more effective protection as enterprises need to act immediately to get a complete picture of their data protection posture and address any shortcomings.” It also notes that the solutions on the market differ from one another depending on strategy and execution. GigaOm considers the following areas to be “differentiating and critical” when comparing vendors’ DLP solutions:

• Deployment Location Flexibility
• Contextual Awareness
• Integration with Collaboration Tools
• Integration with Service Desk & SIEM Tools
• Breadth of Endpoints
• Orchestration & Automation
• Reporting & Analytics
• Extended User Education

DEPLOYMENT OPTIONS

In addition to the various differentiators that separate solutions from one another, GigaOm also recognizes three distinct deployment models and categorizes each solution as one of the following:

• On-premises: These solutions are deployed fully on-premises. Though they may have some cloud integration, the entire service can be deployed in a customer data center. These solutions are particularly valuable for those with concerns over cloud security or data locality or those who have a need to support dark-site installations.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): These solutions are available only in the cloud and delivered as a service that is architected, deployed, delivered, and maintained by a specialist third party. Access to the service is usually via subscription and requires no customer infrastructure beyond potential local plug-ins or agents, usually only from that specific provider. The big advantages of this type of solution are its ease of deployment, ability to quickly scale, and elimination of maintenance costs from the enterprise.
• Cloud image/appliance: These deployments are more “bespoke” than typical SaaS solutions, with a cloud-based virtual appliance or installation image deployed inside of an individual enterprise’s cloud infrastructure. This infrastructure can either be enterprise-owned or provided via a vendor or vendor partner, but the solution is specific to that enterprise. This approach is useful for those with data sovereignty concerns, with regulatory demands around shared infrastructure, or with specific requirements not met by a SaaS solution, but wanting a cloud-based solution.

THE 4 ELEMENTS TO ASSESS DLP PROVIDERS

In addition to vendors’ performance in the differentiating areas listed above, GigaOm also measures each vendor’s DLP solution with four key evaluation metrics, all of which are considered top-line characteristics that define the impact each will have on the organization. These higher-level evaluation metrics include all of the following:

• Ease of Management
• Ease of Adoption
• Reduced Complexity
• Breadth of Business Protection

WHY CHOOSE FORTRA’S DIGITAL GUARDIAN

Fortra’s Digital Guardian DLP solution is cloud-delivered and powered by AWS, making it scalable and easier to deploy while cutting overhead costs. It's cross-platform - providing coverage for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems - and has flexible controls that help protect data before it’s lost. Perhaps most importantly, Fortra’s Digital Guardian can be deployed alongside with our data classification and digital rights management solutions, giving your organization comprehensive data protection capabilities. Read GigaOm’s full 2022 Radar for DLP Report to learn how Fortra’s Digital Guardian is one of the top DLP solutions on the market and be sure to request a demo to try it out for yourself.