Symantec Data Loss Prevention Reviews

We use Symantec Data Loss Prevention mostly for preventing and protecting against email threats. The tool tracks internal to external emails. Whatever attachment there is that's moving from internal to external is also tracked. If someone's sending a file, it would also be forwarded to the team lead or manager. The password for signing into the email should not be shared because when shared, it will be blocked. We have configured these policies in Symantec Data Loss Prevention. The tool also tracks whenever a user transfers data from one machine to another. These are our use cases for it.

What we like about Symantec Data Loss Prevention is that it's a very good product. We never faced any problems with its performance. It has very good performance. There was this RAM issue, but it was an internal issue which we've sorted out. Apart from the RAM issue, there are no other issues with Symantec Data Loss Prevention.

What could be improved in Symantec Data Loss Prevention is its security. It should be more secure.

I've been dealing with Symantec Data Loss Prevention for almost four years.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention is a stable tool.

The technical support for Symantec Data Loss Prevention is very good.

The installation for Symantec Data Loss Prevention was straightforward. It took almost fifteen days to completely roll it out.

I have experience with Symantec Data Loss Prevention. I've implemented it. I was the Symantec expert, and I've also implemented Symantec Endpoint Protection, Symantec Mail Security for Exchange, Symantec SharePoint, and Symantec network storage devices, in my previous projects.

Symantec Data Loss Prevention was deployed on-premises only because the customer requirement was to not forward the logs through the cloud directly, so the solution was installed on-premises.

In terms of the number of clients my company has for Symantec Data Loss Prevention, there are currently two thousand clients.

I would surely recommend the tool to others. Whenever my company goes to the customers, the team always recommends either Forcepoint or Symantec Data Loss Prevention.

My rating for Symantec Data Loss Prevention is nine out of ten.

The primary use case is for handling confidential data, such as customer data, employee data, and IT confidential information. We used this solution in some contracting work. We classify the data by assigning each division user their own classification, e.g., confidential, restricted, internal, or public. According to the data we get from the customer, we find fairly unique keywords and common words from the data and we put it on the Symantec DLP engine as a use case or policy. If, for example, the content or classified files cannot leave the organization, I can turn the use case into a policy as keywords mentioning specific data and unique keywords in the documents. This restricts documents from leaving the organization. That's how I create a policy based on the use case.

Another unique feature which I have found is a solution that we needed for one of our customers. They provided laptops at one of their facilities. Their users had administrator access, but the company cannot control those laptops. They are things, moving outside and inside for technical work. They noticed that their users have personal email accounts through Gmail and they installed Google Drive on their laptops. The problem is when Google Drive synchronizes, most of these company documents have a few admins that sync back up to these personal laptops. 

After deploying Symantec, we created a policy for data loads. We found some confidential files had been backed up to the cloud from their personal laptops. The company documents back up through employees' personal Google Drive. They found it and informed the company, who restricted the application purpose for those employees.

The customer was happy about the solution.

They have a feature on the management side called the document indexer. If you have a unique document with many near-identical versions, which have one or several values that change, while the rest of the content stays the same. You can collect 50 of those documents and put them into this feature of the Symantec DLP system. It will compress them and create a profile specifically for that document. 

For example, if you are getting a daily performance report for your company, each report will be completely the same, except some of the numerical values may change. I can collect 50 documents from the last 50 days and put them into the system to compress the documents and create a profile. I can then put this in a policy that will monitor only those documents. If an employee tries to send those documents outside without authorization, the system will block the documents. I have found the data indexer in Symantec, but I didn't find it in McAfee.

Each company is used to working their own way because they invested in developers and they worked with their project team already. We have worked on some projects and got feedback from the customer. Most of the time I develop this data loss deployment, when I assign data loss threshold values, some data thresholds will need to be higher. For example, IT users need a higher threshold because technical documents include confidential work.

In a 60 page technical document the confidential work might appear 50 times. If that document comes out of the machine or if he tries to send it to another IT user, it will technically be considered data loss because of the threshold value end for the confidential work. In that same way, I have to fine tune those metrics depending on the customer or customer group and the employee group. IT needs certain metrics. A financial user or financial goods need different metrics.

That fine-tuning has to be done for the customer as well as the vendor. If I take Symantec DLP, we have to have some final fine tuning but we may need some time developing this depending on the customer. This is an area where something can be done to improve the product. 

Also, due to the cloud emerging technology in the world at the moment, most of the content and data that we use from the cloud if from some organizations in Europe and the US. For those users, I think Symantec DLP has already provided a testing agent. Those are advantages and improvements that could be made to Symantec DLP.

Their user interface and other features are fine as is.

It's stable. Currently, we are running on two and a half to almost three months. Up to now, I haven't experienced any system issue at the customer place. I used to go and do some fine tuning in the policies only.

It's scalable. There are three users for this solution at the customer. They are information security engineers. Two are senior and one is just an engineer.

Those users are responsible for the solution and the entire agent count is 800 users. For 800 users endpoints have been installed.

It's fine for now, but I think they are planning to expand the solution to another 500 users by next year.

We have experience and most of the time you get very good technical support. In our experience, we only needed support four times for some fine tuning because there is some fine tuning that I cannot do. In those cases, I created a ticket from the support portal and within three or four days they replied. They could typically rectify the issue within one or two weeks. Afterward, they send a report survey for evaluation. 

In short, the technical support is great.

The setup is straightforward. The only complexity comes from the Oracle Database side. Other than that, it is straightforward. It took a half hour to install it. Once you install the manual server, and the detection server on another server you just have to install the alias. I didn't have much problem installing the system.

I installed it myself. Implementation took one day.

I initially checked with the customer how to do their implementation and then I gave them the system requirements. Only then did I go on to staff, once they had given me access to the servers. I only did preliminary planning with technical staff first, then sat down with the customer and planned it more thoroughly.

Only three people take care of this solution from the management side. Externally, there is also a special SI engineer and a travel engineer.

In terms of pricing, Symantec DLP works with Oracle Database. Oracle Database licensing is much more expensive than other databases. That might be a drawback for customers.

The pricing is on a yearly subscription basis. For the current customer year, we already paid up front as part of the first three years.

We had a partnership with Symantec so we didn't use any other solution because we signed an agreement with them and we started deployment with the customer. We evaluated the system with the customer and once the customer confirmed that we should secure Symantec DLP we deployed the solution.

My advice is that the DLP solution is the emerging platform in the world at the moment. First, we had to get some idea on how data works at the customers: data in motion, data in rest, data traveling, etc. Typically data travels through emails from the endpoint by USB, email and CD writing it to a CD or copying it to a network share or from a network share. Those are what you need to know before starting the day of implementation. How this data travels inside and outside the environment.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten, because they are a leader, competing with some other vendors, providing updates, releasing new versions, and providing technical improvements on their side. I would say it's fine.

Our company is a partner and deploys the solution for customers as a management server and email network.

The solution is simple to use with good administrative controls and a console that is easy to understand. This is particularly important because end users are security engineers, CSOs and compliance managers with minimal technical knowledge. 

The DLP is very effective on the application side because there is a control on both endpoint and network storage. These components are separate from each other which needs to be planned out carefully but reduces server needs. 

The solution should integrate with other databases because it relies on Oracle which is not financially feasible for many customers, particularly in small or poor countries. Oracle is very expensive on the cloud side. 

Operational costs are too high for small offices that rely on Microsoft Office, so they instead opt for free yet powerful databases such as MySQL. 

Data tagging and classification would be useful because multiple agent roles are needed solve issues. 

I have been using the solution for ten years. 

The network and storage are very stable. 

I've experienced a few issues with the DLP agent on the windows side when operating systems are mismatched or there is an issue with a group policy. 

The solution is scalable. 

The effectiveness of technical supports depends on the agent. Support from America is good because they immediately direct you to a person or department knowledgeable in your issue. 

For example, American support asks if deployments are new or old and then opens the appropriate case type which speeds up the process. 

I rate customer support a seven out of ten. 

Neutral

The initial setup and implementation are very straightforward. 

Setup is very clear and much easier than McAfee or Forcepoint. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We implement the solution for our customers. 

The solution's pricing is based on a license model. 

The DLP category is very competitive and we implement tools based on our client's needs such as the solution, Forcepoint, and Microsoft. 

Competitive products don't even compare to the solution with regard to its capabilities. 

The only reason to choose another solution is budget because the solution requires licenses for the product and the database. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We are using Symantec Data Loss Prevention for protecting IPs and intellectual properties.

I have found the most valuable feature to be partial enlisting.

Symantec could improve by being more creative and simplifying the functions. Additionally, the data protection should be bundled with data classification and labeling instead of them being separate.

I have been using Symantec Data Loss Prevention for approximately four years.

The stability has been good.

I would rate the stability of Symantec Data Loss Prevention a four out of five. There is room for some improvement.

The unpaid support can have a lot of delays but the paid premium support is good.

I rate the technical support of Symantec Data Loss Prevention a three out of five.

The installation is more complex than other solutions.

We did the implementation of the solution ourselves.

The price of the solution is expensive.

We did evaluate other options before choosing Symantec Data Loss Prevention, such as Microsoft solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others if it fits their companies requirements. 

I would advise those dealing with critical sensitive information to use Symantec, such as in the health care industry. If the data is not as sensitive, I would recommend Microsoft.

I rate Symantec Data Loss Prevention an eight out of ten.

I've been working with Forcepoint, Symantec, and also McAfee. From my experience with the three of them, Symantec has one of the best LP solutions on offer. Forcepoint is on par with Symantec on some points, however, with respect to the granularity of how Symantec has laid it out for the customers, is much easier when compared to Forcepoint. The client also has more opportunities for customization.

With respect to the amount of intelligence that they have with respect to how they formed the DLP solution, for example, exact data matching. If you compare Forcepoint with Symantec, Symantec is more sophisticated than Forcepoint. 

I would prefer Symantec over Forcepoint. 

With respect to how Symantec Data Loss Prevention works now, it's got an edge over all the rest of the Data Loss Prevention with the exact data matching and also the partial matching. We've done a test with that with other solutions, for example, with McAfee and Forcepoint. Symantec is really more sophisticated when it comes to partial matching as compared to other solutions. There's data around this as well. There's a document about a specific confidential file. We will configure everything so that 50% of the data from a document should be scanned. The rest will be detected as black or whatever the option should be or the response should be.

With Symantec, they are capable of doing that. Only a part of the document is scanned and they are capable of detecting the amount of information that is supposedly secure and that should not be sent outside to any unauthorized users. Technically, Forcepoint can also do that, but there are certain limitations. Forcepoint can only do so much. With Symantec, it's very straightforward. You can just specify the version page and then upload the identifier, upload a sample, for example, a series of programming codes. You upload that, you give a sample, and then, just like that, you can already specify a specific response for that and it will be detected. That's also one of the samples that we were able to do with one of our clients. 

Aside from exact data matching and aside from partial matching, there is better machine learning. 

Symantec can offer a more sophisticated OCR. The optical character recognition, which we often showcase specifically for hospitals with x-rays, CT scans, and ultrasounds, is quite useful.

The one downside for Symantec is that, due to its transition from Symantec to Broadcom, there's been a lot of changes. I am based in the Philippines and we don't have a contact person locally for any Symantec.

We no longer have any contact for any Symantec opportunities. It's getting hard for us to request a demo license, or trial license, for a proof of value or proof of POC. Basically, speaking with respect to the technology, technically speaking, Symantec is really good, however, on the commercial side, we're really having a problem with that. 

We always have a problem with respect to the commercial side and how we are offering it to the client. It gets really costly with the database as it's strictly required that clients must have an Oracle database and it's quite expensive if you would compare that to Microsoft SQL. From the technical side, what they need to improve is the database. I'm talking about the on-premise, as, with the on-premise, the database that they require is strictly Oracle and not many end-users are using Oracle for their databases. Some are using MySQL. So it gets really costly when we're offering Symantec and then we have to renew. Oracle is expensive.

What they need to improve is the management console. It's pretty straightforward, however, they need to upgrade it to make it more attractive. While it's easy to understand, from an end-user perspective, they need to upgrade it so that it will be more pleasing on the client's side. It would make them more inclined to look up, for example, for maintenance or visibility and monitoring.  

I've been working with the solution for two or three years. I've only been working within the industry for two or three years, or something like that.

It's stable. Out of all the data loss preventions that I've experienced, Symantec, with respect to its technology, is quite good. Aside from the database, I don't have much of a complaint with Symantec, technically speaking. 

We work mostly with enterprises, however, we also work with some SMBs.

In terms of scalability, it is scalable. Symantec Data Loss Prevention is not only for endpoints. It is also for networks, the cloud, and also for email. It pretty much covers your entire infrastructure.

With respect to the partner support, previously, when we started working with Symantec, support was pretty straightforward and really helpful. I've only been handled a support case a couple of times. It's not much, however, they've been really accommodating. That said, when the transition happened, from Symantec to Broadcom, when Broadcom acquired Symantec, that's when things got really hard for us. Not only from the technical side, not only from the support side but even from the commercial and pre-sales side. It's gotten really difficult requesting licenses, requesting trials, requesting support cases, et cetera.

I've been working with Forcepoint, Symantec,

the last project that we worked on, we worked on the latest version of Symantec. I just can't remember what version was it.

and also McAfee. That's the closest solutions that I've been working with most recently.

I only started learning Forcepoint come 2020, and I have done a POC. However, I find Symantec to be better overall if you compared the two.

The setup is straightforward, as long as you know what you're doing. Back in the day, when I was just starting to learn data loss prevention, it got really confusing. For those who are just starting to learn how it works, it's important to note how the flow works - from identifying what data to protect, to the responses that should be applied to the policies that were configured. It's also important to note the architectural side. You need to pay attention to how the endpoint was set up, as well as the database and the detectors. 

My last deployment for Symantec took a month, however, it came with the testing already. We did it phase by phase. What really took a long time for us to set it up, was encryption, which we deployed together with the data loss prevention. We had Symantec Data Loss Prevention and at the same time, Symantec Endpoint Encryption. We would deploy them together. That client also had the programming codes. We had to deal with a lot of programming codes and it took us a lot of time to review. We had a sit-down meeting with the customer in order for them to disclose the necessary information we would need for the pilot deployment. Then we had to do testing after that. That's why, in that case, it took a month.

They have a subscription based on one-year, three-year, and five-year terms.

The pricing is adequate and good enough for the market.

I'm a reseller. We used to have a partnership with Broadcom, or rather, with Symantec. We're still working on Broadcom. I believe we still have that partnership in place.

In the last project that we worked on, we worked on the latest version of Symantec. I just can't remember what version it was.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

The main usage of Symantec DLP is concerned with its baseline performance. Also, from my experience, their support SLA seems slower compared to Forcepoint.

Among the many features, I like the comprehensive support for features across network stages and email. Customers are very happy with its prevention capabilities, as there is no delay in action when new policies are applied. Regarding incident response abilities, it is helpful, although we receive about 10%-20% false positives. 

In my opinion, Symantec DLP could improve by offering a better online service option, making it more competitive compared to Forcepoint. Performance could also be enhanced, especially in terms of prevention capabilities. Additionally, it would be beneficial to add features that allow for better policy integration with GDPR, such as international credit, bank account, or identity management. This would make it more straightforward for IT, especially in regions like Indonesia.

I have been working with Symnatec Data Loss Prevention for the past three months.

For stability, I would also rate it a seven out of ten. 

It can be complex to scale the product, especially for services. I find it suitable for enterprise-level companies with over a thousand employees.

I rate Symantec DLP a seven out of ten for scalability. 

In terms of support from Symantec, I have had a positive experience with their Data Loss Prevention (DLP) support. The support is helpful, but in Malaysia, we sometimes face delays due to integration policies.

Positive

Setting up Symantec DLP can be complex. From the initial check and invitation, deploying Axion solutions requires human-added calls by email. If they provide more information, it would save us time and be less costly. We often deploy performance on Windows servers, AWS, web applications, and other platforms. Users find it easier when we restart with the fit for the OCA, avoiding a complicated installation process. If they added a feature that allows us to refresh it easily, it would be much better. 

We typically use a SaaS model, but our other option, cloud office base, can be frustrating, so we often deploy on-premises.

For pricing, I rate Symantec DLP an eight out of ten.

Comparing Symantec DLP to Forcepoint, I prefer Forcepoint for its more intuitive dashboard, better reporting, and smoother deployment process.

Overall, I rate Symantec DLP a seven out of ten and would recommend it to other users.

We use it for data loss prevention.

I like the software as a whole. It's a good one. The tool's really working well, and the agents are good. It's not heavy, and it's working fine with the clients.

Technical support is pathetic. Stability and scalability can be improved as well. It would also be better if it could restrict Bluetooth transfers.

Symantec also uses Oracle databases, which isn't really convenient for most customers. It would be better if they switched to SQL.

I've been using Symantec Data Loss Prevention for two years.

It isn't stable. For example, when we compare it to other solutions like Bluetooth, it can't be controlled in Symantec, but others can. 

Scalability can be improved. 

Over the past few months, Symantec's support has come down drastically. Even though the issues were escalated, it remained unresolved.

Unfortunately, it's pathetic, and that's the reason why I decided to stop using Symantec, and I'm going to find an alternative.

The initial setup was really good. It's not very easy and also not very complex. There were some issues, but we managed, and it was running well. Managing Symantec DLP isn't difficult. It's easy. 

The price is competitive. Until last year, the price was okay, but it just increased more than 100% this year. There was no justification for that.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend Symantec DLP to potential users. This is because the support isn't good. So in that aspect, unfortunately, I cannot recommend Symantec.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Symantec DLP a three.

We are only using the security part of it.

We are solution providers. We suggest this solution to our clients for data loss prevention. It also can prevent Trojan and virus attacks on data centers.

The synchronize application detection policies have been very good. We are able to use it with the cloud service connectors and manage it on the cloud.

We want a more proactive reporting structure.

Have a regular newsletter or report to the implementers, letting them what is going on in the market. It should contain case studies and use cases.

There are some features available in the competitors, like Trend Micro and McAfee, which are not available in Symantec.

The stability is at 85 to 90 percent.

We have two people looking after the maintenance and two people monitoring the endpoints.

We have between 150 to 200 users on any one client. Overall, we have approximately 2000 users.

We share feedback regularly with the Symantec technical support team. They provide us feedback and patches based on the reports (client specific) that we send them.

We did not have a solution previous to Symantec.

The initial setup is not very complex. You just have to run it from the configuration spreadsheet. If you follow the applied process, it is fine. If you deviate from the process, then the process can begin to become complex due to lack of understanding. You have to enable all the files based on size and there are some endpoint issues, as well.

It didn't take us very long deploy.

We implemented it in-house since we have people who are certified on Symantec. Before the product is implemented, we send those people over to Symantec. Then, they bring back Symantec's best practices.

We have six to seven Level 2 support people who do the implement part.

The pricing is competitive and not pricey. We also receive corporate discounts.

Initially, when checked out quite a few products, like Trend Micro, we found this product to be the most user-friendly.

Right now, their roadmap is not very visible, so we are trying out McAfee. Currently, we are simultaneously running both McAfee and Symantec.

We plan to increase our usage of this type of product since our clientele is increasing in numbers.