Another RSA Conference, come and gone. In spite of a few changes to the market landscape, the interest in data loss prevention (DLP) technologies seems to be as strong as ever. In fact, the number of vendors touting data loss prevention capabilities continues to grow, even as the numbers decrease among enterprise data loss prevention vendors. As expected, the RSA team was no longer promoting their offering after last year’s announcement of the end of data loss prevention product support. If you were looking for Websense but couldn’t find them, that’s because they’ve rebranded under the name Forcepoint in a joint venture with Raytheon. Code Green has not traditionally exhibited at RSA, but they were represented this year as the most recent acquisition of Digital Guardian.

Integrated data loss prevention (Gartner’s new description for vendors offering limited data loss prevention feature sets) vendors were well-represented, with dozens of vendors claiming data loss prevention functionality. Most of these vendors include email and web security vendors, as well as endpoint security solutions. For the most part, these solutions are limited to detecting various number patterns from a library of regular expressions like social security numbers or credit card numbers. Each solution’s coverage, of course, is limited to the specific traffic it is designed to monitor. However, there were a few interesting approaches, including one where mission critical servers were monitored to detect and block unauthorized data movement to high risk geographic regions.

Among enterprise data loss prevention leaders represented in the Expo were Digital Guardian, Forcepoint, McAfee and Symantec. As usual, the Digital Guardian team was busy promoting their unique endpoint approach, along with the new network and discovery capabilities gained via the Code Green Networks acquisition. Forcepoint made a big splash under their new brand with a very bold booth presence (can you say, “GREEN?”). In spite of some new products gained through acquisition (Stonesoft/McAfee Next Generation Firewall and Raytheon’s SureView Insider Threat offering) most of the product messaging remains the same, just in a new green wrapper.

 Data Loss Prevention