How Digital Guardian Helps Organizations Overcome 7 Data Protection Challenges

1. Solutions that Create Both False Negatives and False Positives

2. Products that Sacrifice Either Security or Productivity

3. Limited Visibility

4. Failing to Keep Pace with New Compliance Regulations

5. Siloing Reporting, Which Complicates Understanding of the Attack Chain

6. Failing to Service the Cloud; Instead Deploying Directly On-Premises or on the Network

7. Requiring Dedicated Resources that are in Thin Supply for Most Organizations

We’re living in a world where data is big and getting bigger. IDC estimates that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created every single day. While this means wonderful things for business, sprawling amounts of information can quickly become a beast too difficult for traditional data defense tools to wrangle. And that means internally or externally, intentionally or unintentionally, more data than ever is now at risk for loss or theft. The stats tell the story:

• The 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report recorded over 5,000 confirmed breaches in the past year, and over 16,000 incidents where data was compromised.
• With each data breach now costing nearly $4.5 million USD, it’s safe to assume that the average company would be unable to withstand the blow.
• The digital landscape has shifted dramatically in the past several years, with the hybrid workforce model here to stay and 89% of organizations migrating data to the cloud in the past twelve months. 

What we see is that it is more important than ever to provide strong and coordinated protection across all user touchpoints with sensitive data, and yet concurrently harder and more complicated to do so.

Much has been made of the drawbacks of legacy DLP over the years, especially as many enterprises have embraced digital transformation and adopted cloud technology. Digital Guardian, with 20 years of experience protecting valuable data and IP, can help organizations overcome 7 of the biggest data protection challenges facing businesses today, including:

1. Solutions that create both false negatives and false positives
2. Products that sacrifice either security or productivity
3. Limited visibility
4. Failing to keep pace with new compliance regulations
5. Siloing reporting, which complicates the understanding of the attack chain
6. Failing to service the cloud; instead deploying directly on-premises or on the network
7. Requiring dedicated resources that are in thin supply for most organizations

In today’s evolving environment, most status quo DLP solutions are hard to set up, scale, and maintain. They offer insufficient operating system, browser, and application coverage, and those limitations can be disruptive to end users. Additionally, they are not understood and supported properly by business leaders, lessening their effectiveness even more. “DLP lite” alternatives have hit the market, touting “easy to install” agents, but they have no teeth. These lighter offerings offer no controls to stop the loss of sensitive data; after all, data loss detection is very different from data loss prevention. Integrated DLP offerings manage to leverage existing investments, but they, too, leave critical vectors open to sensitive data egress due to an inherently siloed approach. 

These fits and starts have only played into the years-long debate over whether DLP is really dead. Comprehensive DLP (which includes Endpoint DLP (eDLP), Network DLP (nDLP), and a host of other cloud-delivered functionalities) is taking over at a time when the industry needs it the most, and Fortra’s Digital Guardian is proud to be leading the charge.

The problem: Your security teams constantly juggle between stringent security protocols and day-to-day effectiveness. All too often, one of the balls drops. While DLP solutions aim to protect sensitive data, they sometimes hinder productivity due to limited processing power and a lack of policy flexibility. That makes balancing things like collaboration and large batch transfers difficult to reconcile with gapless security. 

The DG Solution: Digital Guardian enables organizations to define rules and exceptions based on user roles, the level of data sensitivity, and what AI-based tools can learn via machine learning. Granular controls, from “log and monitor” to “block,” automatically protect data before it’s lost, saving your team time and oversight. And if time for creating policies runs short, our “risk discovery” approach lets your team see where data resides and flows, as well as its risks.

Additionally, our support for all operating systems and any browser (without installing an extension) helps minimize time to value and eliminate potential efficiency-sapping snags along the way. For instance, other DLP providers would be unable to detect data theft over Chrome if the browser was recently upgraded to the latest version, resulting in a Help Desk ticket and a session with a support engineer who would then require the user to install an extension on their machine. With Digital Guardian, teams benefit from flexible deployment options that work wherever they do, saving them time upfront and along the way.

The problem: Most DLP solutions build rules around known instances of data loss, producing alerts in a limited “letterbox” view. However, this leaves the organization vulnerable when an unknown risk pops up, causing customers to capture transmitted data for further analysis. While this may help, it requires dedicated analytic resources, with raised privileges and additional stores of sensitive data that need to be secured and protected. 

At this point, complex environments are still preventing traditional DLP policies from grasping the full picture of each incident. Recent research by ESG confirms that the majority (78%) of organizations only have a “strong awareness” of less than 80% of their assets. If companies struggle to keep track of the assets themselves, how will they be able to navigate what’s being done to them or create sufficient policies to secure them? 

The DG Solution: Digital Guardian can gather vast amounts of data activity events by default, without policy triggers. This allows all the data activity before and after that “letterbox” view event to be analyzed, giving greater context and understanding without the need to see the sensitive data. To prevent data loss at scale, deep visibility is required that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the data itself. 

It does this in two ways: 

• Real-time visibility into system, user, and data events such as file save-as, file rename, file/document delete, file copy, cut, paste, system reboot, and content copy.
• Historical detection searches across the enterprise for existing egress and attack activity that may have occurred in the past. 

Digital Guardian’s endpoint engine performs this analysis in real-time, stopping risky activity and preprocessing alerts so they are immediately actionable when they hit the management console.

Using our advanced analytics engine, you can: 

• View high-level snapshots of sensitive data usage across the enterprise
• Drill down to relevant information at the user, machine, or file level
• Target investigations by users or groups using our integrated forensics capabilities
• Integrate Digital Guardian event logs with SIEMs and other event aggregators 

Behind our advanced analytics and reporting capabilities is Analytics and Reporting Cloud (ARC), powered by AWS, which leverages streaming data from endpoints and appliances to provide deep visibility into systems, data, and user events to provide the context you need to identify and remediate threats.

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The problem: Organizations must keep up with the constantly changing government, industry, and often private security requirements of an evolving digital climate. To be compliant, all data pertaining to a particular compliance requirement must be identified and accounted for on a regular and ongoing basis. However, complex internal environments and hyperdistributed ecosystems make it difficult to locate—and therefore protect—all relevant information. Almost 33% of security leaders say that their ability to comply with regulatory requirements could be negatively impacted by a lack of visibility of sensitive data. Nearly nine in ten report not having that visibility. 

The DG Solution: Compliant data is visible data. Locating compliance-sensitive content becomes simpler, easier, and more automated when data is classified. Digital Guardian makes it possible for you to gain visibility into your organization’s sensitive information on day one and understand exactly where your company’s PII, PCI, IP, and PHI data reside (and more), along with how it’s being used. Plus, get the added benefits of device control and encryption to help you maintain control of your compliance-sensitive information. 

Use Digital Guardian to help you comply with regulations in between, with, and such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ITAR, DPDP Act, and many more. 

Monitor PII, PHI, IP, PCI, and PHI data autonomously: 

• DG agents immediately start classifying and tagging compliance-relevant data via automatic content inspection.
• Tags remain with the data no matter its movement, giving you persistent visibility.

Provide Real-time visibility of data transmission: 

• Get near-real-time reports on the movement of data based on its classification.
• Set alerts for policy violations.

Enforce device encryption policies: 

• Requires information written to removable devices to be encrypted using FIPS 140-2 level 2 validated encryption.
• Control who can access devices or media, inside or outside of your organization. 

Stop data theft by enforcing device use policies: 

• Block, encrypt, or prompt when a user tries to copy data to a USB device.
• Identify all removable devices connected to your endpoints by type, manufacturer, model number, and MAC address.
• Control removable devices via endpoint ports like USB, FireWire, eSATA, and webcams. 

One global aerospace company called on Digital Guardian to help them meet upcoming ITAR requirements that required it to secure several unguarded attack vectors on an aggressive deadline. With current security resources tied up in day-to-day operations, the firm chose Digital Guardian’s Managed Security Program (MSP). With Digital Guardian experts managing both internal and external threats, ITAR-specific data classifications were put in place and sensitive data guarded within the timeframe, all without adjusting the capital budget or adding any additional servers, software, or personnel.

The problem: Typical DLP reporting can be siloed, separating factors that work in concert during an attack. Multiple reports need to be combined to give cybersecurity decision-makers the full picture, slowing down investigations, complicating compliance, and hindering remediation. 

The DG Solution: Digital Guardian combines system, user, and data events in a single report. This allows you to see risky behaviors within the context of normal noise and have the context required to stop them at the time of abuse. This enterprise-wide intelligence provides a full timeline of events and a defensible chain of custody in the logs that document file movement. 

Events that get generated by the classification software and consolidated into the reporting database include: 

• Sending an email with (or without) a selected label value
• Saving a document with (or without) a selected label value
• Sending an email that contains a policy violation after reviewing the warning
• Downgrading or upgrading a classification level, or attempting to
• Using a classification application on identified computers 

Event forensics are recorded by time, user, system, application, file type, file classification, and network operation. Correlated events are bundled, hashed, time-stamped, and cryptographically signed for investigative analysis. Lastly, deep visibility reporting presents a full picture of all compliance-related assets.

The problem: Most organizations manage an array of disparate tools and applications to protect their business. Many require them to stand up server infrastructure, deploy applications, and then maintain and update them. This incurs expensive infrastructure and management costs, more resources as the platforms scale, ongoing OS and application version maintenance, and intangible reparations as dedicated internal resources are diverted to “feed and water” the services. The overhead burden of deploying a new technology is causing many to look to cloud-based solutions as an alternative. SaaS adoption has grown a sizeable 32% in the last two years, with BetterCloud predicting that 85% of all business apps will be SaaS-based by 2025. 

The DG Solution: DG provides a vendor-run SaaS solution, MSP, and on-premises options. We pride ourselves on flexibility of deployment and are one of the few organizations to support all operating systems. 

Our team is responsible for backups, patching, uptime, scalability, and all the day-to-day maintenance of the DLP solution. Additionally, Fortra’s Digital Guardian takes the utmost care with our customers’ sensitive data, and at no point stores the actual data itself. This ensures that only the clients themselves are the ones with access to the raw data, as designated by them. 

This was the case with one of our customers—a global leader in workforce management engagement. With thousands of endpoints to protect, a mix of OSs, browsers, and applications, a constantly evolving pool of data, and a lean in-house IT staff, they chose Digital Guardian’s SaaS deployment option to implement granular data protection controls that could fit their needs today and scale with future growth. After a simple purchase and rapid deployment, the company gained instant visibility into all data movement from endpoint to cloud, without additional internal resources. Deployed on thousands of machines, Digital Guardian was the only DLP solution that could provide full coverage for their diverse environment.

The problem: Aside from operations-level maintenance, many companies struggle to find or maintain the dedicated resources required to analyze all security instances at scale. Dedicated experts with specific expertise are required to make sense of all the data generated by DLP engines and turn alerts into language the business can then act upon. As cybersecurity skills continue to be in high demand, organizations are challenged to staff their security needs. According to data by labor analyst firm Lightcast, companies currently only have enough trained cybersecurity professionals to cover 72% of demand. 

The DG Solution: Digital Guardian’s Managed Security Programs (MSP) remove the resourcing pain point by supplying skilled expertise where it is needed most. We make it a point to align with the business processes of our customers, minimizing the impact of adoption and ensuring rapid return on investment. 

With Digital Guardian MSP, you get: 

• Fully managed data protection infrastructure | Get your data protection infrastructure deployed, hosted, and managed by Digital Guardian.
• Visibility, reporting, and threat alerts | Get notified of real-time threats with live and configurable dashboard views that provide to-the-minute insights on critical data usage and threats.
• Immediate access to our experts | Get instant access to Digital Guardian experts boasting over a decade of experience implementing mission-critical data security, incident response, risk, and compliance programs for the government and Global 2000 companies.
• Time to value | Get up and running with a phase-one deployment in 90 days or less.
• Cost savings | Use the money you save on upfront technology and staff investment elsewhere.

Digital Guardian offers three MSP options: