Digital Guardian Makes DLP More Affordable

At the Black Hat USA 2017 conference today, Digital Guardian unveiled a data loss prevention (DLP) cloud service that leverages the agent software the company employs to drive a threat detection service.

Dave Karp, chief product officer for Digital Guardian, says the Digital Guardian Analytics and Reporting Cloud makes use of an implementation of the Apache Spark in-memory computing framework and related Big Data software hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to identify sources of data exfiltration. That cloud approach, says Karp, should make a modern approach to DLP more affordable to a broader number of customers that previously would need to have acquired some form of a transaction database to deploy a DLP solution on premises, says Karp.

“We’re removing the infrastructure costs,” says Karp.

Now that most organizations have come to recognize the value of their data, there’s a lot more awareness of the need to protect that data. Sophisticated cyberattacks are increasingly targeting specific data sources in the hopes of gaining access to, for example, invaluable intellectual property.

It’s not clear to what degree responsibility in an organization for DLP and threat detection falls on the shoulders of the same person. Karp notes that most smaller organizations are not large enough to divvy up those responsibilities. The one thing that is clear is that regardless of the size of the organization, the need to protect data is increasingly becoming a paramount concern.