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Verdasys is moving its data leak prevention portfolio to the cloud to help enterprises protect their data stored on its networks and still reduce costs.
The company introduced two new offerings-Verdasys Managed Service for Information Protection (MISP) and Verdasys Information Protection as a Service (IPaaS)-that offer data protection as a managed service, Verdasys said Jan. 26. MISP and IPaaS would help enterprises reduce the cost of data security, the company said.
MISP is a fully managed enterprise information protection offering hosted in Verdasys facilities and supported and maintained by Verdasys experts. IPaaS allows end users to deploy and manage their own enterprise data policies without additional setup or infrastructure costs, the company said.
MISP and IPaaS will help enterprises “cost-effectively manage the biggest risks to their critical data,” said Jim Ricotta, CEO of Verdasys.
Verdasys built its managed service around a hosted version of its flagship Digital Guardian DLP software. Digital Guardian protects intellectual property, trade secrets and privacy data with its layered, contextual risk insight and data-centric policy enforcement, the company said. The software relies on tamper-resistant agents to tag and classify information within the enterprise and transfer all data forensics back to the server via an encrypted communications channel. Digital Guardian provides updated analytics, alerts and reports.
None of the customer data ever leaves the customer environment to be stored on the Verdasys servers, the company said.
Administrators can continuously monitor data, application and system access and usage, whether end users are online, offline or in virtual environments. With MISP and IPaaS, organizations will be able to apply specific risk-based policy controls to adhere to data governance and compliance rules.
Customers signing up for MISP or IPaaS are given access to Digital Guardian management servers hosted within Verdasys facilities. MISP customers leave the task of administrating the DLP servers to the Verdasys team. For IPaaS customers, the administration tasks falls on to the company’s internal security team.
Verdasys began offering DLP as a managed service because one of its customers, a large insurance company, requested Verdasys to take over the job of monitoring and protecting the data. Verdasys research found that 30 percent of its enterprise customers would prefer having a managed services option across many of its IT functions, Ricotta said. While the preference was driven mainly by a lack of IT staff, organizations were also concerned about not having the security expertise to manage data in-house.
There is “tremendous potential” for a managed services model that could help customers implement advanced data protections, according to Ricotta.
The four-year development and evaluation program for the DLP has been “so successful” that Verdasys is opening up the on-demand DLP offering to other customers, Ricotta said. MISP will be available to organizations at $19 a month for every endpoint being protected. IPaaS will be offered at $12 a month per endpoint.
With the hosted version of Digital Guardian, organizations are able to simplify and speed up enterprise DLP implementations that cost significantly less than other types of on-premises offerings that are “less functional” and require hefty investments in hardware, software and IT staff, the company said.