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Data protection ratchets up |
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Wednesday, 13 August 2008 |
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DLP sector gets hotter with new acquisitions…
Interest in the data loss prevention (DLP) market opportunity is definitely heating up with the agreement of McAfee to acquire privately owned DLP company Reconnex for US$46mn in cash, and the recent launch by Sophos of a €217mn offer to acquire Utimaco Safeware AG, another DLP player.
DLP may go by various noms de guerre – Data Loss Protection, Data Leakage Protection and content security among them – but IDC figures cited by McAfee have the value of the information protection and control (IPC) market expanding from US$765mn in 2006 to US$3.2bn in 2011, representing a 33% compound annual growth rate. And late last year when now market leader Symantec acquired DLP company Vontu it cited a Goldman Sachs Security Spending Survey that indicated more than 50% of CISOs believed data leakage to be a top driver of their organisations’ security spending.
The Ovum consultancy has run the rule over the McAfee acquisition, in the form of a Straight Talk posting authored by principal analyst Graham Titterington. Ovum finds the purchase good in parts. “Reconnex claims that its products lead the way in the DLP field in their ability to discover the information held in a corporate IT environment, and to learn appropriate data loss prevention policies to protect them. It backs these claims with customer testimony that its products delivered business value within weeks of being deployed. It is already protecting 1.5 million end users, despite its limited resources and market visibility,” writes Titterington. “However, in reality the distinction between products in the field is less clear-cut - other products can discover data across a network and adapt DLP policies in the light of experience to varying degrees. All products require a degree of human assessment and scrutiny. This is not a black-and-white capability.”
“What is certain,” adds Titterington, “is that McAfee is raising the bar for DLP products and challenging the incumbents. DLP will be a high-profile topic for a long time and the battle will heat up through 2009 and 2010.”
John Williamson
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