Not much thought has been given to protecting unstructured data because historically, hackers, phishers and thieves target large structured databases and for years now, email. But it isn’t anyone’s fault. It is merely a symptom of the lack of maturity in the tools that aim to tackle this unruly problem. Traditional Enterprise Data loss prevention (DLP) tools were not initially designed for protecting unstructured data, and encryption and policy are not centralized and few have taken advantage of improvements in recent years. In the meantime, unstructured data has piled up and is growing.
To target this problem, a new set of vendors and products emerged with “data-centric” solutions adding to the confusion. So many vendors with a variety of capabilities to choose from, but how do you know which is right? What vendor do you choose? The answer to these questions is to think more about what you want to accomplish and weigh the approaches first. Having insights into the differences between the three predominant approaches to data-centric security and understanding their unique benefits will allow you to make better decisions around the best fit to strengthen the front lines of protecting unstructured data while complying with privacy and industry regulations and data governance policies.