Symantec Protects Data Everywhere with Information Centric Security

Symantec Corp., a global leader in cyber security, today announced the release of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) version 15 providing increased data protection automation and product integration to strengthen the Information Centric Security solution. These major enhancements provide a greater ability to discover, monitor and protect sensitive or regulated data even in unmanaged environments.

Organizations are losing visibility and control over sensitive and regulated data as it is shared with a wide range of users across multiple organizations and stored in various locations, including the cloud.

Nearly 1 in 3 IT security executives believes data loss is the greatest internal threat to businesses this year (Symantec CISO research 2016), with concerns about shadow applications and malicious users. The problem continues to grow, with data breaches in 2016 resulting in 1.1 billion identities being exposed — double the number in 2015 per the Internet Security Threat Report volume 22 published in 2017.

The upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduces new obligations for organizations and the information they handle, and comes with increased penalties and heightened scrutiny for compliance. Analysts believe that visibility and protection, which can follow data, will become the new imperative.

Symantec’s Information Centric Security solution allows organizations to store, use and share sensitive data outside their managed environment with external users or cloud apps. Greater protection is ensured because data access is limited to authorized viewers, reducing the risk of unwanted exposure. This Information Centric Security approach helps ensure safe collaboration and helps to enable compliance for stringent regulations such as GDPR. The release of Symantec DLP 15 extends this capability through enhanced integration with cloud access security broker, data classification, user-entity behavioral analytics and information-centric encryption to support a wider range of communication channels.

Symantec DLP 15 highlights include:

• Protects sensitive data in managed and unmanaged environments and when handled by third-parties
• Helps to enable compliance with GDPR
• Helps ensure sensitive data doesn't get leaked through shadow applications

“The sheer volume of data and the speed at which it moves around organizations has magnified the data loss problem. Sensitive data needs to be tracked everywhere – even outside the organization – to ensure security and maintain compliance with a growing roster of industry regulations,” said Doug Cahill, Senior Analyst, ESG.

“With so much at stake, it is no longer possible to depend on manual tagging or any other process that invites the possibility of human error. With Symantec DLP 15, we’ve given IT managers the ability to automatically tag data as sensitive and automate security policies that follow that data everywhere it goes, regardless of channel,” commented Tarun Kaura, Director, Product Management, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec,