Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention Reviews

The most useful features of Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention are the transfer through Bluetooth can be blocked and the transfer to the cloud-based storage can be blocked. The features are wonderful.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention can improve by having an uninstall option for the client or restart of a client agent can be controlled from the server. This feature is missing which is available with other solutions. 

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for approximately two years.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a stable solution.

The scalability of Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is good.

We have approximately 500 users using this solution in my organization.

I used the support a couple of times and they were good.

I rate the support from Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention a four out of five.

I have previously used Symantec.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a medium level of difficulty for the initial setup. It's not easy or very complicated. 

We required a consultant for the implementation of Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention. I do the maintenance and support for the solution.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is costlier than other brands, but not all. Of the solutions, I have used Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is more costly.

I rate Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention a seven out of ten.

We use this product to ensure that our intellectual property is protected. DLP gives us control over IPs and company-sensitive data. It also helps us ensure compliance with global policies and industrial policies like CISS, personally identifiable information, and all sorts of data. 

Forcepoint has a unique fingerprinting technology. We set a policy and as soon as a document goes into the repository, the policy applies. When I receive a document from my MD and want it to remain within the organization, I move it into a repository and it's viewed as sensitive. It's an efficient way to ensure that documents are safe. DLP ensures that data doesn't flow out. 

I would also add that the predefining feature is a very simple process. You pick your industry, add the email, choose your country, populate the type of policies that suit your region, and your industry, and then you can choose what to block and what to allow. 

In general, Forcepoint is miles ahead of its competitors. The closest similar solution would be Symantec, but they're still miles behind.

Currently DLP is an on-prem product and the cloud version is an add-on. I'd like to see DLP as a cloud or hybrid option so we can deploy it as a full cloud solution or on-prem as we choose. I hope they're looking in that direction, it would make a huge difference.

Most of my customers are looking for the ability to control or shut down the USB port devices so that content coming out of the port is blocked. Forcepoint added it to the DUP add-on. McAfee DLP has that feature and most of our customers requesting this have moved from McAfee and want it in Forcepoint DLP.

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. It's been around for a while and has never needed a patch or hub fix. 

The solution is scalable, we currently have 2,600 users. 

If I have all the prerequisites, all the firewalls open and everything, I can deploy in one day. The initial setup requires some expertise to implement. It's easy for me because it's something I've been running for a couple of years. Policies are the issue and they have to be tweaked every day. 

The product is very cheap because it's a DLP switch. It comprises DLP for endpoint, DLP for the network, and DLP for discovery. Forcepoint sells the DLP endpoint, the DLP network, and the DLP discovery separately, and you can choose what you want. We go for the suite which comprises all three which is cheaper.

This is a good product. It's important to understand your needs and pain points.  Once you're clear about why you want it, it's easy to set up and then build from scratch in line with what you want to achieve. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Forcepoint DLP's most valuable feature is that it provides complete end-to-end security. It gives us an understanding of any violation happening in the network or via endpoint.

The post-optical character recognization feature could be improved because it only really works on documents with some length (at least three paragraphs). If someone has copied half a paragraph or half the content from a webpage, it doesn't work. In the next release, Forcepoint should include DLP, antivirus, and encryption in the same solution, which would resolve many of the IT problems we face.

I've been working with Forcepoint DLP for about five years.

Forcepoint DLP is stable.

This is a scalable solution.

Forcepoint's technical support is very good - they help you the moment you log the ticket. They're much more helpful than Broadcom, Symantec, or McAfee.

The initial setup is very simple and can be completed without an integrator.

Forcepoint has been very cost-effective because they gave us a good deal while procuring the DLP solution, and we just needed to add one license as we already had the appliance-based solution for the web proxy.

We evaluated Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro but found that Forcepoint was the best for complete on-premise without comparing the CASB solution, had the best UI, and was the most easily maintained.

I would recommend Forcepoint DLP to other users and would give it a rating of nine out of ten.

We have different areas of DLP like drive, chat, email, network, and endpoint protection. We have different data classifications which are regulated in our industry. Based on that data regulation, we created a few policies as per our government standards, like the social identity number, personally identifiable information, and personal health information. 

We categorized data for different sectors, and we have applied policies, and Forcepoint DLP actively filters it. If I'm sending some PII to you, it should get filtered out because it's against the organization's norm. It does its job actively.

I like that you can quickly create policies and enforce them in a matter of minutes. 

It would be better if we could easily integrate with other products. Suppose I want to integrate this DLP with some other CASB solutions or a firewall solution. In that case, it takes a considerable amount of time because Forcepoint DLP doesn't come with a legacy firewall or CASB solutions to integrate with it. We need to do it separately.

It's not improvised for different sectors, and I need to look for other solutions. I'm investing a lot of time researching and implementing other solutions for other areas. That is one point where I can't feel satisfied with this Forcepoint DLP.

The only problem we have faced is that it consumes most of the CPU whenever a Forcepoint DLP is deployed on an endpoint. This is when users feel some lag in their machine's performance or their Internet performance. That's when we uninstall and try to reinstall, or we'll give a cloud link to which it gets access. We use Forcepoint DLP for endpoint protection, not for email or cloud. For email and drive, we went with the Google DLP.

Forcepoint DLP isn't as efficient on drive or chat, or email. For that, we have some specialized solutions, but it would be better to have a single console where you can control all these areas. It would be pretty easy for a consumer who is going to use this product. All in one shot, you can try to track it and enforce your policies on a single dashboard. That is one point currently lacking in Forcepoint, and I feel they need to work on it.

In the next release, I would like to use this DLP across different solutions like network, firewall, email, or chat with a consolidated dashboard and with integration facilities with other solutions.

Security should work as a whole. It shouldn't work individually in blocks. It does not serve our purpose. It should be integrated with multiple solutions. For that, it should have enough intelligence to work with other tools.

I'm looking forward to seeing that kind of capability with Forcepoint.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for three years.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a stable solution.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a scalable solution. 

Technical support is pretty good. I don't see any kind of delay. As soon as we raise the request, we always get support from Forcepoint DLP immediately.

I heard that the implementation was pretty simple. Only the policy creation took time because we had to build use cases for it. Your industry might have a different use case, and my industry might have a different use case. It took a little bit of time, and it came from an implementation standpoint, and I felt it was pretty good. 

You just need one person working in shifts to use this solution. As we have 8,000 employees, we are doing it in shifts with three professionals.

We used an integrator to implement this solution.

We evaluated Google DLP and Netskope DLP. We chose Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention because of the ease of policy creation. For any DLP solution to work effectively, we need to create our use cases. On top of use cases, we need to build policies and enforce them. In Forcepoint DLP, it's pretty simple to create any kind of policy and enforce them. It doesn't take a lot of time to get it enforced. It all takes a matter of minutes, and I feel this is the biggest advantage of using this DLP solution.

If the organization is pretty small, then I can recommend this solution. However, if it's a pretty huge organization, I will step back a little bit because it won't serve its whole purpose.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention a six.

Forcepoint DLP is a part of a data protection program. A customer will rely on a main DLP and use a complementary tool, in addition to the DLP, such as a data classification solution like Boldon James or Microsoft Information Protection. They will also complement the solution with a rights management solution like Microsoft Rights Management. Forcepoint is part of a big portfolio for data protection.

We deploy the solution at customer sites. Most of our customers are in two sectors, financial and telecom. All of our deployments are on-prem.

Among the most valuable features are the

• network DLP, which has two components 
• DLP agent installed on endpoints
• discovery, as it covers the endpoints and shared folders on servers. 

These features are important for control. A main part of DLP is its use as a tool that provides different layers of controls.

The Forcepoint tool is well developed. It is ranked in many evaluations at the top when it comes to enterprise DLP solutions. It has good artificial intelligence that enables our customers to focus on specific incidents, instead of having a complicated list of uncategorized incidents.

There is room for improvement regarding OCR. I would like to see it enhanced to handle multiple languages and it should be easier to manage.

There are also options that could be handled smartly in the tool, like the way a web data source is handled. It would be good if any downloaded document could have the same policy.

I've been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for three years. We are not regular users, we are admin. We provide the solution for our customers.

The stability is good. Issues are generally related to the agent. Whenever the agent is stable, the solution is stable. Whenever there are issues, it is common for them to be connected to the agent, making the solution unstable. Based on our experience, the stability has not been very good, but it has also not been bad.

We have implemented the solution on anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 endpoints.

We get good feedback regarding the support. They respond well and provide support whenever required. They are aware of their product in a professional way. And whenever we escalate to the highest level, we get to a suitable person who can provide us with what we require.

One thing that could be improved is that escalation could be done faster.

Neutral

I have seen Forcepoint replace Symantec or McAfee in some cases. I haven't seen any cases where a client wants to replace Forcepoint.

A mandatory process that should be done before implementing the tool is a data classification analysis and the setting of a policy for data classification. These processes are done through an analysis session with different departments. The session includes teaching them about data classification policies and getting information from them regarding the data that needs to be protected and the recommended classification level that data should have.

We then deploy the server-side in the data center and start installing a sample agent. We test this agent and we test sample policies to ensure everything is okay on the sample agent. Finally, we do a full deployment.

Maintenance, post-deployment, involves making sure the solution is updated to the latest version. It has different components, and each component should be updated to the appropriate version. The same goes for the agents on the computers. The configuration should be reviewed and maintained over time, as well. One person is enough to maintain a Forcepoint instance.

As a partner, we have seen ROI with Forcepoint. We cover our costs through licenses, implementation services, and SLAs in which we support our customers and help resolve their issues whenever they want to open cases or adjust configuration.

They are flexible regarding the pricing and they have a good model for an OEM data classification tool. This makes for good pricing. Forcepoint has been one of the most competitively priced products over the last few years.

Overall, Forcepoint has good strategy and development. It is stable and has not changed as a company for a long time. It is focused on a specific solution and that makes for a good portfolio.

We are a solution provider and Forcepoint DLP is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We have Forcepoint DLP at one of the telcos and one of the things that we are trying to discover is information, across the organization, that is of a personal nature. We are using it to comply with POPI, which is the equivalent of GDPR in South Africa. We are also using it for PCI-DSS requirements. This discovery component works quite well with respect to the search.

When we deployed it for a bank, it proved highly efficient in terms of PCI compliance. It was very quick to pick up where people were divulging personal information regarding credit card holders. We then deployed very simple rules that we had customized, without the need for data classification.

Initially, if you were just doing PCI-DSS, because it's very limited information that you needed to protect, you could do it without data classification. This was good for an organization that had data to protect and wanted to comply with PCI-DSS, but had not done the data classification at that point.

The rules that we put into place were simple. For example, if more than two credit card numbers are being pushed out then block it, or first put it into monitoring mode and then block it.

One thing that I really like is that you can customize the rules. 

The challenges that we've had are related to deployment, especially around the discovery component, and with the local support that we receive in South Africa.

With respect to the discovery component, the reports are very hard to interpret because they come out in an illogical format. We forwarded the reports to our local support team, who were also unable to help me. Eventually, the problem went to the UK for that team to interpret the report.

Ultimately, my biggest challenge is the discovery component with respect to the reports, as good as it is in terms of the integrity, or the search. It is a question of how you translate technical reports into business language. We tried the cloud version, which is Forcepoint CASB, and we found the same thing.

The local support team is made up more of salespeople than engineers and as such, the support in South Africa can be improved.

My experience with Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention goes back to 2005 when it was still called PortAuthority. The product has evolved massively since that time. I have deployed it and worked with it for different organizations at different locations.

Initially, it takes a little bit of processing but nothing to be too concerned about. Stability-wise, nothing has really annoyed us. 

The scalability is fantastic. One of the things that I like about Forcepoint is that I can customize the solution to suit my objectives. For example, if I only wanted to prevent PCI then I could just go in and do that.

One of my clients has quite a large deployment, with approximately 30,000 users. They have plans to roll it out to the rest of Africa.

Technical support from the UK is good. However, the experience of local support in South Africa is not at the level it should be. Most of the local staff are salespeople, as opposed to engineers. Support for the deployment of the product is seriously lacking.

In the UK, they were much more knowledgeable about the product, as well as the outputs and how to actually read them to make business sense out of them. It was much better than what we had in South Africa. Locally, they simply said that they didn't understand it. Most customers will shy away from products when the support is like this.

Because they answer the phone, I would rate the local support a two out of ten. The European support was better, so I would rate them a five out of ten. There were delays in their response but I'm not sure if it was related to the difference in time, or it was part of the ticket escalation process.

One of our clients was using the Symantec solution prior to Forcepoint. We convinced them to switch because Symantec does not have a great presence in South Africa and support was an issue.

They had been using it for quite a long time and had not seen the necessary return on investment. With the new legislation, it was time for them to change to something that was more practical, and more user-friendly. The product works great now.

The implementation is not as easy as people make it out to be. Once you get it right, the product is fine, but this requires understanding it and getting the proper training. A novice that has begun to work with the tool can find it quite difficult to implement if they don't have a good understanding of the product, and do not have the right support.

For example, in one organization it took us about three months to implement it, whereas it should have taken about a month.

Our clients have hybrid deployments, where they are part on-premises and part cloud. The choice of cloud provider is made by the client but they either choose Microsoft Azure or AWS.

The implementation strategy that we use varies depending on the client. For example, at the bank, we wanted to prevent data breaches, especially with credit card information, and ensure compliance. Therefore, our strategy was focused on just the PCI requirements so that we could take reasonable measures to protect the organization. Essentially, we wanted to go from zero to hero quite quickly. That was possible because of the flexibility and agility of the product.

When it came to the telco, it was a completely different strategy. It was a long-term strategy in terms of protection of personal information and preventing it from being divulged without authority to would-be criminals.

When we deployed it, we literally had to look at the requirements and configure it from a POPI perspective. In this regard, the deployment was skewed toward personal information breaches.

We worked with a local reseller, Performanta.

Their skills were meant to be the best in the country but it left a lot to be desired. We had to use the UK offices and that's a challenge with most of the organizations in South Africa. With big vendors, South Africa is a small market, so the investment in South Africa is not what it should be. Understanding, managing, and integrating products needs to be improved, in general.

For deployment, there were eight of us in total. Two were engineers, there were four analysts because we had to write the business rules and document them, there was a project manager and a few others.

Maintenance is being done by the client, in-house. They have two engineers that are responsible for it, and they have purchased support from the local providers.

My clients are seeing ROI because the privacy office is quite comfortable now that they've done everything reasonable to meet the compliance requirements. There is a level of assurance provided by the DLP solution.

In terms of pricing, it is good for a corporation but they do not cater to small to medium businesses. They have to look at a different pricing structure for small to medium-sized enterprises because the cost is too high.

This is compounded for the African market because of the exchange rate. One dollar is equal to approximately 15 rands and if you were to multiply that by the price of the product, it becomes quite costly.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing feed, although you still need to understand the operational impact that it has on an organization from a resource perspective. That needs to be factored into the total cost of ownership.

We compared Forcepoint with NetSkope to assess its reporting capabilities and we found that the NetSkope report was very easy to translate, understand, and explain to a business. Forcepoint was instead very cumbersome, unstructured, and illogical. It required an expert to actually interpret the report, which is something that you don't want.

We have also looked at the McAfee product, as well as the one from Microsoft. At that stage, the solution from Microsoft was a little immature and I have not looked at it since. Forcepoint was the leader when we implemented it for our clients.

Comparing Forcepoint to the other products in general, the data discovery capability was great, except for the interpretation of the report. The OCR capabilities were also good for us because it's a telco and they have a lot of paper going through. 

The tool works great but they don't talk about the operationalization of the tool from a process perspective. When people sell DLP solutions, they talk about the efficiency of the tool, but they don't talk about the impact that it has on an organization from a resource perspective.

You would need a team to analyze all of the exceptions that you have, like the way they do in a SOC, where you have analysts looking at the incident. They analyze and investigate it, and then determine whether it is positive or negative and something that we have to be worried about. For example, our organization had approximately 70,000 end-users, who were employees. There is quite a large amount of data that is transferred across our network.

In our case, if a person is sending more than one credit card credential out of the bank, it was flagged. If it was more than one, you had to have a whole backend process where the analyst had to look at it, then perhaps ask the person why they were sending out this information.

When we were first looking at this product, there was nobody who informed the customer as to the complete ecosystem that would be required to have an effective DLP solution in play.

My advice for anybody who is looking at Forcepoint is that they need to understand what it is that they are trying to prevent. You cannot be totally dependent on the tool to do everything. This is not a criticism of Forcepoint but rather, a criticism of the way it's sold. The product will do what it's built to do. But, if you're expecting it to automatically manage the incident, then it cannot do everything. It can block, it can monitor, and it can create alerts, but you still need your analysts. For most CSOs or IT managers that are looking to deploy, they must factor in the practical implications of operationalizing it. They need to have a process in place. They need to have an escalation process in place, and they need to have resources like analysts to actually look at the exception reports.

This is an effective data leakage solution, it does what it's meant to be doing, and the interfaces are great. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using it is to understand the total cost of ownership.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It's for DLP and to monitor and make sure that no key files are being sent out of the organization. It also helps in terms of tracking any abnormal behavior.

We have about 700 users and it's endpoint-based. We add an agent to the endpoints and it coordinates with the server.

With Forcepoint we found that one employee who left had taken some files, and we were able to stop it. And if somebody is under a notice period, we now monitor whether any files are about to go out. When they take something with them, we can see that. We can also identify any abnormal behaviors that are happening. A lot of times it happens that if somebody is about to leave, they try to take some information away with them. We catch that fast.

It also helps in terms of HR stuff because file movement can indicate people who are looking for jobs. We can see CV movements and it helps as an indicator of a dissatisfied employee. We can at least see the behavior and see if we can do something about it.

Before Forcepoint, we had data in terms of how many terabytes go in and out, but now we can specifically see what goes where.

One of the most valuable features is being able to see file movement, where files are going. Every week we review the files. It can identify software codes, so we code files and we know where they're going and who's doing what. It gives us visibility. It shows any key files, any strange behaviors, such as if somebody is taking too many screenshots, and alerts us about that.

I would like to see improvement in the reporting. We can only get one week's worth of data; we can't get more than that. Also, the reporting console is very slow, making it very frustrating to use. There are times when I open it up on a Monday and take a download, but it takes so much time. You can get busy with other things and come back and it's still hanging and you can almost forget about it. 

Also, the server goes down and we have raised tickets to resolve that. In the past two weeks, we've had to deal with that two or three times. It's been a little annoying lately.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for one year.

The system is stable, but as I mentioned, the reporting portion is very unstable. If I want to get reports out, it takes a long time. Sometimes the server is down, and I have to raise tickets. I have had problems there.

The scalability is okay, there are no problems with that. We can add on more agents as we expand with more people. We haven't had any issues there.

I would rate customer service at 8.5 out of 10. When we have problems with the system, they respond and they generally resolve things within half a day.

This is our first solution of this kind.

The initial setup was straightforward but setting up the rules was very complex. It is something where things don't actually work as we think they will work. It generated a lot of false positives in the beginning.

Our deployment took about a month.

Our strategy was to start with auditing first. We haven't actually moved to blocking yet. When we tried to move to blocking critical files, it ended up blocking some other people at work. There are some issues around that and we have had to be careful.

We let it run on its own. I look at the data in Forcepoint on a weekly basis, but we don't have any administration of it, per se. My IT team handles the deployment of new employees coming in, meaning the deployment of the Forcepoint agent on their laptop. That's about it in terms of admin.

An integrator helped us, somebody who deals with Forcepoint products. There were no problems with that, although they were billing by time and the system is a little complex.

We have seen return on our investment because we're able to track our data. It's not so much an active return on investment, but more like an insurance policy. It prevents bad things from happening.

The pricing is reasonable. That's why we went with Forcepoint. They were pretty competitive.

There are no additional costs, other than the cost for additional licenses that we have to pay for ad hoc.

It's not as easy as Zscaler to connect. To be very honest, I think Zscaler has a better product with a better interface, but the cost of Forcepoint is more attractive. That's why we went for it. We looked at McAfee as well. McAfee is a bit resource-heavy. 

Zscaler was very good. The interface was really good and it's easy to set up. Forcepoint is okay. I spoke to some other customers who used Forcepoint and they said, "Look, the interface is a bit complex, but it has everything in place."

You need to put a lot of time and effort into Forcepoint, you need a dedicated team for it. You also need to have a data classification strategy firmly in place. You should classify your data before you get it. You also need to test your rules thoroughly before you implement them.

We are using it for PCI compliance.

One of the most valuable features is the set of built-in policies that Forcepoint has for PCI compliance. We just need to activate them and start working. Without them, it would be a big task to do a data transformation. Another advantage is that Forcepoint also updates these policies. If there is a new control for PCI compliance, Forcepoint updates it in its system and it can be downloaded.

Forcepoint is also easy to use and manage.

The reporting features, the real-time reporting, can be improved in Forcepoint. On the dashboard, we don't have a feature that shows real-time incidents. We have to schedule a report in the environment.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for two years. I am a partner for Forcepoint and Symantec. I suggest DLP solutions to my customers.

Forcepoint is very stable. Symantec is also very stable.

Forcepoint is quite scalable. If we have more network traffic, we can add an appliance and it will be enough for that increased traffic. It scales up.

The number of users in environments where we have deployed Forcepoint is between 5,000 and 7,000.

I would rate Forcepoint's technical support at eight to nine out of 10. The support has separate sections, including essential support and basic support.

The initial setup of Forcepoint is straightforward. It uses a Microsoft SQL database and the solution is implemented on Microsoft Windows Servers. When it's based on Microsoft, the solution is very integratable. Optimization of the installation is not complex. It is just like installing other software on Windows. We just need to learn the setup process and click some tabs and the solution is installed.

In general, the initial setup of the different components of Forcepoint takes only two to three days.

Our process is that we first install the database and then we install the Forcepoint Security Manager, which is the centralized location for policy management and reporting for all the solutions' components. Then, if required, we install the additional Security Manager. It is straightforward. Next, we implement the DLP on the endpoints, and then we work through the network side.

One of our recent deployments of Forcepoint was for a bank that has requirements for PCI compliance. In terms of what they invested in the solution, they got the value back within a quarter.

The licensing of Forcepoint is quite straightforward. It's based on the number of users. The support fees are a separate cost.

The main functionality of both Forcepoint and Symantec is actually the same. But when it comes to deployment, Symantec's solution is difficult to deploy. To deploy Forcepoint I only need three Windows servers, but to deploy Symantec DLP I need eight Windows Servers.

With Forcepoint, we can take backups automatically from the appliance itself, using the Security Manager, in case of disaster. We just schedule a backup job and it takes the backup from there. But with Symantec DLP there is no feature for backing up and we have to do the backup manually.

But for larger enterprises, Symantec provides an Oracle Database where there are no limitations for keeping incident data in the database. Forcepoint uses a SQL database that can't hold as much data. Large enterprises often use the Linux operating system for their core applications. Symantec fully supports a Linux implementation of the core architecture of PLP in a Linux environment, but Forcepoint is only installed on Microsoft. This is one of the biggest factors for larger organizations, given that they often require a PLP solution.

If an organization is small or medium in size, I would deploy Forcepoint for it. The price and the architecture requirements, and the equipment required for small and medium businesses, is reasonable. For large enterprises, with more than 20,000 users, I would deploy Symantec.

The primary use case is to protect sensitive data going out of the organization and helping the team to manage the incidents to create few to no false-positive incidents. 

Mac users can use Forcepoint DLP without any problem. They can create user-defined policies rather than using pre-defined ones. Using the fingerprinting policy can safeguard any data kept on a particular drive. We're using OCR to protect data being sent out through images implementing discovery policies to check if any particular file is been shared.  

The Forcepoint DLP is such a useful tool for organizations as it protects sensitive data with multiple kinds of functionality such as OCR and an analytics engine (which helps determine if any sensitive data is in danger of policy violations). It's easy to determine the incidents that have been triggered. This has helped to identify what sensitive data has been shared. The only part where it didn't work so well is during agent upgrading. If we automatically try to upgrade the agent it causes a lot of problems.

With OCR and Risk Analysis, we are able to determine if anything sensitive is been shared. OCR helps us to safeguard those things and with risk ranking, we can determine which user is trying to violate policies multiple times even though they have been blocked to him or her. It does require additional servers, as the processing and result of the incident is high, however, it's worth using to see all the use cases being met with these two features as well. They are the best features provided by Forcepoint.

The feature which needs improvement is the Forcepoint agent upgrading. When you automatically try to upgrade the agent it causes problems. For example, the system starts to behave abnormally or the agent is unable to communicate with the policy engine. If we try to upgrade to new version with the old version running, sometimes it works without any issue, but sometimes it causes a lot of issues and it gets disconnected from the DLP servers. 

You can see incidents via delays on the console even if the agent is properly installed and connected with the proper policy updates.

I've used the solution for two years.

We use it mostly for endpoint protection of PCI information, as well as PII, such as social security numbers.

We have a hybrid system, in that we utilize the cloud as well as our on-premises appliances. Depending on where the customer is, if they're on-premises or if they're working from home or elsewhere, we have that covered with the hybrid solution. Forcepoint has its product available in the cloud and we use the on-premises side when the data is going through the appliances.

The greatest benefit is the detection, detecting either accidental or unauthorized transmission of certain kinds of PCI or PII data that we prohibit. It's very useful to get that from alerts. We can also block them outright, depending on what threshold we have set. That's the most useful thing about DLP, that it prevents unauthorized usage of that kind of data.

Some of the built-in rules, templates, and content classifiers are among the most valuable features. Some of the built-in patterns are good places to get started with. Along with the phrases, they are helpful in putting together policies and fine-tuning our policies. A good example of that would be certain kinds of credit card data. They have a lot of algorithms available to fine-tune what exactly you're looking for, whether it be credit cards from Mexico, or US credit cards, et cetera. They have a good database of those types of predefined algorithms, ways to detect things, and the specific information you're looking for.

These features are valuable because they work and seem to be picking up the right data. They seem accurate. It's also convenient to be able to choose them and not have to figure it out myself or create my own. That goes a long way toward fine-tuning our policies.

The user-friendliness of the interface in formulating DLP policies could be improved. An example would be managing policies. It's a little daunting at first, and can be confusing, at times, when it comes to how to set things up and how to add policies. They could improve on that.

Overall, I would like to see them modernize. I'm on version 8.5, so there are newer versions out. They may have done that already. I'd have to demo the newer versions.

We're planning on upgrading this year to 8.6. I believe that in going to 8.6, we will be gaining some additional features. The newer versions will have better detection capabilities with improvement to their algorithms.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for about five years or six years.

The on-premises solution has high availability. The appliances that we've used are very stable. They just keep running. We have had very few issues with the appliances in terms of failure. In those situations, they were more on the hardware side. They just needed a reboot and that fixed things. Overall, the stability is good for on-premises. 

In terms of the cloud side, availability doesn't come into play as much because we don't change policies that often. We don't modify the policies on a day-to-day basis. We might modify a policy once a week or once every month, at the most. The client or endpoint really just needs to receive that update once, and it's pretty much good to go. So we're not relying too much on the cloud availability, except for that initial update for each endpoint. The cloud availability is going to be more relevant on the web side of the product, where you're going to want continual web access, filtering, et cetera.

One feature that I'm getting ready to take advantage of more is the ability to add more data crawlers to the DLP on-prem environment, without any extra Forcepoint costs or licensing needed for that additional data server. That will help in reducing the stress on the data server that we're using now. It will help manage all the policies, the clients that connect to it, and all of the network discovery tasks, especially. They will all be handled much more efficiently when we spread the load. We're looking to add an extra one or two Windows Servers for that, so the additional cost would just be related to the Windows setup.

Forcepoint's technical support for the solution is excellent. The technicians that I have dealt with have been with their company for a long time and they know their product inside and out.

There has been no other similar solution here, as long as I have been with the company. I started off with a sister company, and they actually used a very early version of Websense, which is what Forcepoint used to be called before it became Forcepoint. That means we have never used a competing vendor.

I was not involved in the initial deployment, but we've had it ever since I've been on the team here. I've been managing it ever since. I was there for the initial deployment in one of our sister companies. It wasn't anything unusually difficult. It just required installing some hardware and getting all the firewall rules worked out. Once you get all that in place, everything usually works pretty well. That's been my experience, even with upgrades. Most of the time our issues have been firewall blocks within our own company. That's usually the biggest hurdle, overcoming our firewall-related issues.

We use it on about 5,000 endpoints and we have two people who administer  it. They're both information security analysts.

I don't have ROI numbers. I base everything on: "Am I getting the support that I need?" And the answer is "yes."

We have never looked at other solutions at a PoC level.

What I can recommend is getting the highest tier of support that you can afford, because it's absolutely critical. I don't know how I would do everything if I had to submit a request and wait several days for it. I don't know how I would keep things going in that situation. With a higher level of support you can call someone and you also have someone who is managing your account. That's also really nice, because you get some extra benefits out of that.

I'm very satisfied and would rate it at nine out of 10.