DLP solutions help companies protect their data and enforce their policies in a variety of ways. In a Digital Guardian webinar, Forrester’s Heidi Shey presented the 2017 DLP Trends and Tips On Choosing The Right Vendor. You can watch the full webinar on demand here. Check out a sneak preview of the webinar below.

Why would companies want a DLP solution? DLP can detect and prevent violations to corporate policies regarding the use, storage, and transmission of sensitive data. Today, there is a major gap between the employees who are aware of the data use and handling policies and those who are not. This leads us into some of the key challenges that are driving the resurgence of interest in DLP solutions and services today. These challenges include:

1. The inability to enforce data use and handling policies. It is not enough to just have the policies if they are not being enforced. DLP solutions can help shed light on how employees are trying to move data around in ways that are violating security or privacy policies. The solutions enforce those policies while educating the workforce to help decrease the risk of insider threats.
2. Data protection and privacy requires more than just regulatory compliance efforts. DLP solutions can help enforce different types of data handling measures that may have been outlined in a customer privacy policy.
3. Security and business demand for cloud services. Because of increased adoption of cloud services, companies want more visibility into data use, data movement and the ability to enforce data handling policies.

In addition to addressing those key challenges, DLP solutions help to:

• Protect data at rest, in motion, and in use
• Address multiple channels of data loss (email, endpoint, network, cloud, mobile, etc.)
• Centralize management of DLP policies
• Enforce policies to prevent data loss

The demand for DLP solutions has been on the rise in the past few years because of the amount of data breaches that occur today and the amount of employees who lack the proper education to keep companies secure. For more on the latest trends driving DLP adoption and what criteria to evaluate vendors on, watch the full webinar.