Digital Guardian Reviews

Mainly, I'm in charge of pre-sales, so we are currently doing a POC. The solution is primarily used for data loss prevention.

We will use if for our customers in manufacturing that are in rather high tech sectors. They want to prevent their internal employees from taking their IP, their intellectual property, to their competitors.

There are a lot of stories of IP being stolen in the manufacturing industry, so organizations, like the one we are working closely with, are quite concerned. I am responsible for many high tech customers in the manufacturing industry and I use Digital Guardian to prevent their employees, especially the RD team, stealing items. It's typically easy to do so, due to the fact that the IP in many IT teams is right on their desktop (more so than their notebook). They try to steal the IP in many ways, including via USB or email, or through their own BYOD devices. When I'm doing the POC, I try to figure out all the ways they can steal in the existing environment, especially on their laptop. Doing so will protect a company's most valuable asset - its IP.

The feature we call desktop recording is the most valuable aspect of the solution. Not only can we collect data from the user's usage, but we also capture his screenshots when he is trying to steal the data. 

We can go back seconds to minutes before the action happened using a buffer technology. When the user is trying to steal the data, we can go back to maybe one minute before and do this action. We can collect the visual evidence so we not only have the log that we collected, we only have the action that he is doing on his desktop. The evidence can help our customers when they try to go to the court to pursue their ex-employee for this kind of action.

We're a distributor of the solution. I personally handle pre-sales.

Some web upload actions need to be improved due to the fact that DG is a very strong technology on the endpoint. For the network DLP site, Digital Guardian also has a solution, however, this was acquired by Digital Guardian from another company. Therefore, it's not integrated with its endpoint DLP solution closely. We've just started using it, however, we have noticed it's not integrated very closely. If Digital Guardian can improve this network DLP site, it would be perfect for both the endpoint and also the gateway site.

Some features on Mac and Linux are not complete currently. For example, some device control features haven't been transferred over to the other systems. If they could have their Windows features also available on Mac and Linux, that would be perfect. Some of our customers have a Mac environment for their RD environment. Having the solution fully capable of handling everything in a Mac environment is crucial.

We've been using the solution for about three months.

The solution is quite stable on the endpoint side. It's much more stable than competitors such as Forcepoint and Symantec. Users will find it reliable.

The solution is scalable. I know that, for Symantec, you have so many different kinds of roles of modules for different kinds of technology all over. However, in DG, they are always in one server. This includes the DB and the management server for the endpoint in one box. 

We can set up the endpoint manager into the DMZ or the branch office, for managing the branch office's endpoints. It's definitely scalable, and, for this kind of setup, it impacts the customer's cost due to the fact that we only count the user's endpoints and not the management servers.

From my experience, the solution's technical support is good. I can open a ticket directly with the partner or through the email directly to their technical support. On average, they will respond in one week. I can then go through everything with their technical support team to have a further investigation done on the case. It's good. We're satisfied with the level of support.

When I was in Symantec, I also handling Symantec's DLP solution. Compared to the Symantec DLP, for the policy, for the rule, DG is a little bit complex due to the fact that you have many kinds of use cases.

Therefore, DG is a bit more complex. It's even more complex than Forcepoint. That said, it has very comprehensive coverage and control. 

For the price in the market, it is a little bit higher than Symantec and Forcepoint. However, I believe, especially in the manufacturing industry, it is the only solution that makes sense for them. If an organization really wants to do the data loss prevention, there's no other choice.

Overall, for the endpoint DLP and especially for the manufacturing industry, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I work for a company who is an integrator of the Digital Guardian product. We are selling the solution and installing the solution on all our customers' sites. We have several projects where Digital Guardian is deployed as a DLP solution mostly.

Digital Guardian can be also used as device control, application whitelisting, EDR, and user behavior analysis. There are a lot of good features in Digital Guardian.

Digital Guardian has cloud correlation servers which give you visibility. Works like EDR and the correlation servers are like a perfect instrument for security analysts.

The agent is a powerful thing because it is powered on the kernel site. You can control applications and data flow. 

You can use it with EDR solutions.

The room for improvement with Digital Guardian is that it will be better with the Linux agent because it is the only DLP solution for Linux workstations. It still needs to upgrade the agents to the latest version for the Linux kernel.

The vendor promised that in April they will have the universal agent for all operating systems, for Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. We are waiting for this new universal agent. I think Digital Guardian needs to improve the universal agent. That would be really great.

It would be good if Digital Guardian would have dictionaries from other languages inside of the solution, e.g., a Ukrainian language dictionary.

Digital Guardian has great stability. They are working on the solution and have updates coming up pretty fast where they are adding new features on the agent.

From our projects with our customers, it has pretty good stability.

Digital Guardian has great scalability. In one of our projects at the moment, there are 2500 users but they plan to implement about 15,000 users.

In other projects that we manage, there are about 1000 users using Digital Guardian. Also, we got some new projects in last year where it was supporting around 2000 users.

Our biggest customer is a Japanese fabric maker who has 100,000 endpoints.

The customer service with Digital Guardian is good because they answer fast. The Help Desk is also really good. We had some issues with one project. They solved it the same day, Digital Guardian connected via Webex and resolved all the issues on that project.

They support all languages.

It's pretty easy to install and implement the solution. Put it on our universal server and the solution is already working out-of-the-box.

Other DLP solutions are not quite so easy to install or to implement as Digital Guardian.

On all EOP solutions from the customer's side, it's hard to understand what data they want to protect.

It is really easy for us to deploy this solution.

Pricing and licensing I know mostly for the old versions of Digital Guardian. Now mostly DLP and other security solutions have subscription licensing.

Digital Guardian has both, subscription and perpetual licenses, but I think when everything (all technologies) will go to the cloud they will only offer subscriptions.

The vendors need to pay to cloud services like Amazon. They will need more money for that because Digital Guardian has the subscription linked to the cloud service.

If I compare Digital Guardian with Symantec, the license cost is lower, but McAfee can be cheaper than Digital Guardian. It depends on how many licenses you plan to buy and how big the project is. The cost is not so high as Symantec, but not as cheap as McAfee. They can easily sell the solution for price.

It is not the cheapest EOP solution. It's in the middle of the prices.

I tested previous options. I was working with McAfee DLP, but when compared to Digital Guardian, McAfee is old, i.e. not a next-generation DLP solution.

If somebody wants to implement a DLP solution, they need to understand which data they need to protect and how they would want to classify this data.

After that, make the choice in which DLP solution you want. I would rate Digital Guardian with a nine out of 10 because there is no solution that will be fully perfect.

We use the solution mainly for data classification and data loss prevention. We're seeing this solution being used by everyone from mid-market, medium-sized banks or financial institutions to insurance carriers, and we see it deployed at companies that work with personally identifiable information. 

One of the ways in which this technology has improved our organization is that it is set up in such a way that they have strict data classification rules. So if an end user wants to upload or email a document to one of their personal accounts, they are able to block certain files or certain information. They are able to block certain information from leaving the enterprise and corporate network.

What our customers find most valuable in Digital Guardian is the rule sets that they have for data classification. They are already set up to search for PII data, which is basically the personal identifying information for our customers. So you can quickly use their classification engine, or rule set, to set up inspection rules to determine whether data has PII, like social security numbers, date of birth, addresses and things like that.

I would like to see the workflow, to get all the rules and policies set up, be less complicated. If you've been in the field and have the technical knowledge, it's fairly intuitive, but the hardest part is setting everything up and doing the validation for the other rules. I think the whole system needs improvement, even though it works fine the way they designed it. The problem comes when a tool is written by engineers for engineers, and not necessarily for someone who doesn't have that background. Someone like a high-level manager. 

Some clients find it hard to set up all of their PII types. The interface also has some limitations in terms of which browser you can use. For me, that's the biggest headache. For the version we use, you must use Windows Explorer. The background requires you to have a bigger insight into the business processes. It's not just a tool that you can simply drop in and expect to work because there is an impact on business operations.

I would also love to see integration with cloud offerings, Like AWS, Azure, and GCP. And better browser support. 

I would say the stability of the solution is determined by whether or not you follow the recommended installation guidelines and sales engineering guidelines. Outside of that there are no guarantees, and we've had issues trying to push the boundaries. For instance, if the system requires you to use Internet Explorer, you may experience operational issues when you use another browser. So it doesn't mean that the system is unstable, it is just that the way the application is written, one may expect issues with the response codes from the different browsers.

We did have some issues with scalability, in terms of the HA replication, and the number of agents they have. In terms of the actual boundary limit, and what that boundary looks like, I don't know where scalability becomes an issue. I know we had issues going from region to region replication for those rule-sets.

I primarily work with Digital Guardian deployment for different clients using virtual infrastructure because I had a private cloud. I use them because they created an MSP version of their software. Colleagues of mine that used the standard appliances as well as the MSP version don't have any issues.

The technical support is really terrific. 

A lot of individuals that we get into contact with didn't have a previous solution in place. 

The initial installation of the software in the server is actually very straightforward and it is quite easy to install. It can, however, be a challenge for entities that do not have a data governance policy or structure already in place. This tool doesn't help them develop that, it only applies what the current policies are for data classification and data control.

It took me about three weeks to deploy the solution, but when a client has no data classification and they have to develop those systems first, installing and deployment might take as long as six months.

Provisioning is not a full-time job, but the continuous maintenance from all the alerts that occur from the different rule-sets that are created is based on the size of the organization. We've seen as little as three people managing alerts on a 24/7 basis, and we've seen companies where the alerts go to a security operations center, where there is an entire systems engineering department that helps triage those alerts. 

That is a problem with this tool - you can go from having nothing to do with this tool based on your policies, to having continuous tickets and a workload that requires you to get more staff to meet your IT Operations demand. 

I definitely see ROI in terms of data that has not left the company. If you're under GDPR and you prevent private information from leaving, then you see immediate value in returns. 

Our customers are happy with the pricing. There are additional costs if you use support contracts directly to Digital Guardian, so they do have professional services. These add-ons are helpful in building out rules, or in the event that the client has custom templated data. The professional services help to create the regular expression engine to detect that data. So, they do have professional services to actually help create these custom data cost-efficient rules.

Yes, they looked at other options like Symantec DLP, Forcepoint, and a few others. But based on technical needs or the way they could operationalize, they chose Digital Guardian. So if you look at enterprise data loss prevention this solution is the best.

I would recommend that you start looking at policies that would come out of the privacy office, or the DPO, the Data Privacy Officer. Most companies don't have a DPO, and that's why they really need to start looking at creating data classification guidelines and policies and understanding the impacts to the business on where their data flows and how it flows because this impacts the configuration of the digital guardian solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.