Three minutes to data loss protection with Blue Coat
Blue Coat DLP Appliance
410 N Mary Avenue
Sunnyvale CA 94085
http://bluecoat.com/dlp
Price: 250 users starts at $12,000 + $34 software licenses subscription per user
Data loss protection is still an evolving field, but Blue Coat brings a comprehensive solution that can be quickly configured to stop leaks of confidential data to unauthorized users. Is your data leaving with employees that are getting downsized? Is your customer list now the property of one of your competitors? The Blue Coat DLP Appliance can detect when critical information is being copied from your network to a Web mail account, or placed inside a document that is emailed as an attachment, even over an encrypted connection or hidden inside a compressed file ZIP archive.
Some basic features, but yet another piece of hardware to stack on top of a ProxySG. I wonder when BC will create an integrated product, unlike the expensive offering they have now, that tends to be too complex to manage for SWGs, let along incident management and remediation.
Policy Management looks simple (a draw for some), but as soon as you use them, business units will want more and it appears much less extensible, or affordably scalable, compared to traditional competitors in the DLP space.
Any endpoint or e-Discovery pieces? I didn’t see that covered…
Daniel
27 Jul 10 at 3:35 pm
By basic features, do you mean support for multi-byte characters for languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Korean and others; fingerprinting of structured and unstructured data; coaching pages to educate employees; and exact and partial unstructured data matches? These are just a few of the “basic features” that the Blue Coat DLP appliance supports because we see those as the most advanced technologies that a solution needs to mitigate false positives, enforce policy on a global basis and provide a comprehensive DLP program. Alternative solutions in the industry don’t support these “basic features.”
The Blue Coat DLP appliance integrates all DLP functionality into a single platform to solve one of the most fundamental obstacles to DLP deployments – the DIY nature of existing solutions that ship only as software. This forces customers to acquire servers for each DLP function (email, network, web, discovery) and a database before a deployment can even happen. Then, existing solutions also require agents on information sources for data discovery.
Pairing the Blue Coat DLP appliance with the ProxySG for SSL inspection is exactly what customers need to build a comprehensive DLP policy with an architecture that scales to enterprise performance levels. And, the Blue Coat DLP appliance is agentless, so customers don’t need to install a monitoring agent on every information server. Simplifying the acquisition, simplifies the deployment.
The Blue Coat DLP appliance also provides immediate notification of incidents and allows administrators to take action. More importantly, though, the appliance allows administrators to create customized “coaching pages” that are displayed when a user violates policy. This immediate feedback loop educates employees to help them self police and is a critical component of any DLP solution.
A quick view of the user interface during a three-minute video hardly offers a view into policy extensibility and scalability and statements based on such limited knowledge of the true functionality are not only misleading but deceptive. As any network administrator will tell you, policy management is complex. But the Blue Coat DLP appliance aims to simplify this with pre-defined reports that let customers easily implement some of the most common policies before building ones that are specific to their businesses, regulatory environment, etc… These pre-defined reports not only provide a rapid time to deployment, they also enable customers to quickly begin discovering where sensitive data is on the network. That knowledge is critical for developing the correct policies in the future.
Tom Clare
29 Jul 10 at 2:43 pm