Digital Guardian vs. Apex One Data Loss Prevention

When it comes to Digital Guardian vs. Apex One Data Loss Prevention, both offer enterprise-grade functionality to prevent sensitive information from sifting through cracks in an organization's digital infrastructure.

However, Apex One Data Loss Prevention is surprisingly different from Digital Guardian's DLP offering, and choosing between the two can be challenging. 

In this post, we'll compare the deployment options for both Digital Guardian and Apex One Data Loss Prevention. We’ll also detail the functionalities of these two DLP options and examine their individual interoperability capacities and supported platforms.

In this article:

• What Is Digital Guardian?
• How Does Digital Guardian DLP Work?
• What is Apex One?
• How Does Apex One Data Loss Prevention Work?  
• Digital Guardian vs. Apex One DLP: Which One is Best for You?
• Final Thoughts
• Frequently Asked Questions

Image by PopTika via Shutterstock

What is Digital Guardian?

As a part of Fortra's lineup of cybersecurity tools and services, Digital Guardian provides comprehensive data loss prevention for most modern endpoints in an organization's network. 

How Does Digital Guardian DLP Work?

With Digital Guardian, network administrators and security team leads can protect everything from private consumer information to competitive trade secrets and valuable intellectual property from a single management tool.

Digital Guardian leverages installed agents on an organization's network of endpoints to monitor events at the system and data level, responding to risks in real time regardless of whether a given device is online or not.

Designed to work with most systems, Digital Guardian can accommodate the majority of active endpoints within your company's network without leaving significant gaps in security.

What is Apex One?

Apex One is Trend Micro's digital endpoint security hub from which a number of cybersecurity tools and services can be managed. A wide variety of network-based attacks are actively monitored and mitigated through Apex One's combined server application and endpoint security agents.

How Does Apex One Data Loss Prevention Work?

Apex One Data Loss Prevention is a separately licensed facet of the Apex One ecosystem that provides the essential DLP tools admins depend on to preemptively stop data from leaking.

Data in need of protection can be identified ahead of time, and policies can be put in place to prevent unauthorized transmission on supported systems.

Photo by Christina Morillo via Pexels 

Digital Guardian vs. Apex One DLP: Which One is Best for You?

Now that you have an idea of what both Digital Guardian and Apex One DLP are, we can dive into what really separates the two from one another. 

There are three factors you should consider before choosing a viable DLP solution. These are:

• Deployment options - Each tool offers options for installing or accessing DLP features.
• Cross-platform coverage - The types of platforms and devices each DLP tool can work with.
• Interoperability - The set of potential integrations with different systems each option supports. 

The importance of each of the factors above will surely be unique to your organization, and what works well for one use case could crash and burn with another. 

Below, we delve into details regarding each of the above factors as they pertain to Digital Guardian and Apex One DLP's offerings.

Deployment Options

The perfect DLP service for your use case can be licensed and leveraged in a way that matches your business objectives. A service that doesn't quite fit your needs will need constant adjusting at the least.

In Digital Guardian's case, Amazon Web Services serve as the backbone of a cloud-native DLP tool set. You can deploy the Digital Guardian DLP suite using a simple SaaS model, allowing you to scale it out as your operations shift with time.

This approach helps to decouple your organization's growth and security needs from IT staffing requirements and infrastructure investments.

Digital Guardian also offers an appliance-based approach in which anything from a physical machine to a cloud-portable image can be used to deploy at speed.

This opens the door for on-premise installations that can be managed internally or by Digital Guardian as needed.

In the case of Apex One, to use both the hub and its DLP extension, you will need to install them and set them up. Apex One is available as a service without DLP functionality, though.

Lastly, Apex One can only be deployed on select Windows and Mac operating systems. This could make accommodating certain workflows a challenge.

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

Cross-Platform Coverage

Without support for the systems and devices your team uses on a daily basis, DLP tools will leave substantial gaps in your security layer.

Digital Guardian is an industry outlier in this area as all major operating systems are supported by default, including Windows, macOS, and Linux distros.

As mentioned above, Apex One is only available for Windows and macOS. It is also fairly limited in its support for these, accommodating only releases after Windows Server 2012 and macOS Mojave 10.14.

Interoperability

To fully defend your network from potential data loss incidents and other threats, it is essential that the tools in your arsenal all work well together.

Digital Guardian integrates with the data classification tools you are already accustomed to using, leveraging these to inform more metadata-driven security decisions.

Apex One adopts a more isolated approach, focusing instead on the core functions your admins will need, but limiting the interoperability of its DLP with other types of data classification solutions.

Final Thoughts

Whether Apex One Data Loss Protection or Digital Guardian's DLP offering suits your organization's needs, you should aim to incorporate proper security measures for your data sooner rather than later.

DLP solutions allow your organization to meet compliance objectives and preserve competitive advantages at scale. Contact Digital Guardian today and learn more about how we can help.

Frequently Asked Questions 

What is Apex One data protection?

Apex One data protection is a module offered by Trend Micro for the Apex One security hub. It combines data loss prevention and device control functionality on certain network endpoints to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information within an organization.

What does DLP software do?

DLP software offers data loss prevention functionality to organizations that need to protect sensitive information and comply with specific regulations.

Do I need DLP?

With DLP, you can determine what data within your network is being used in risky ways and block inappropriate usage before it has a chance to negatively impact operations. 

This is handled through the use of customizable security policies that automatically enforce predefined rules at supported network endpoints. If your team is large or growing and must regularly control access to certain types of data, then DLP is worth implementing.