Selecting Data Protection Technologies

Forrester enterprise customers have increasing needs to protect their enterprise data. Not every data protection challenge requires technology to address it. But when effective protection cannot be guaranteed by process compliance alone, technology can play an important supporting role. To narrow down the range of technologies available to them, enterprises should answer four questions about: 1) the business drivers prompting the initiative; 2) the type of data to be protected; 3) the sponsorship of the initiative; and 4) an honest assessment of the time and resources the organization can realistically commit. Enterprises seeking to prevent toxic data from being spilled should choose from full disk encryption (FDE), email encryption, DLP, and DLP Lite technologies. Enterprises seeking to keep their intellectual property secret should consider DLP, eDRM, and file encryption technologies. Regardless of the technologies selected, chances for success increase dramatically when data owners sponsor the solution.