HelpSystems Buys Another DLP Firm
December 1, 2021 Alex Woodie
HelpSystems’ buying spree of security firms continued in late October when it acquired Digital Guardian, a provider of cloud-based data loss prevention (DLP) solutions. It’s the second DLP-related acquisition that HelpSystems has made in the past 24 months, and while it doesn’t appear to support IBM i directly, it will undoubtedly be sold into HelpSystems’ large IBM i customer base.
Digital Guardian’s flagship product, the DG Data Protection Platform, is designed to prevent data from wandering off into the hands of insiders and external threats. The software, which runs on AWS, uses a combination of agents and sensors that provide visibility into system, data, and user events occurring across Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms.
The Waltham, Massachusetts, company also has a network appliance that inspects traffic across customers’ email, websites, and cloud properties. The suite also sports a database record matching fingerprinting technology that can identify data wherever it sits, whether it’s in motion or at rest, the company says.
All this data collection and analysis gives Digital Guardian a unique view into the state of data at customer sites. The company claims that it is not only used to protect existing data assets and known use cases, but also the data and use cases that are not well-defined or well-known to the customer but present risks nevertheless. As data governance laws take effect across the world, the capability to lock data down can help customers comply with the new regulations.
HelpSystems says the Digital Guardian offerings will be used with existing security offerings, including GoAnywhere, Clearswift, Agari, and Titus. It will also compete to an extent with Clearswift, the UK-based DLP provider that HelpSystems acquired in December 2019. Digital Guardian’s offering doesn’t work directly with IBM i data. But HelpSystems says that, with the Digital Guardian Network DLP appliance, it is able “to scan data on IBM i via NFS and Db2 via [an] ODBC connector.”
Digital Guardian was founded in 2003 under the name Verdasys by Dwayne Carson, Nicholas Stamos, and Tomas Revesz. The company, which has raised about $173 million, changed its name to Digital Guardian in July 2020, at which point it had 300 large customers and more than 2 million endpoints deployed protecting 52TB of data
HelpSystems CEO Kate Bolseth says Digital Guardian will be instrumental in helping her customers ramp up their security projects. “. . . [T]he data protection expertise the Digital Guardian team brings to HelpSystems is second to none,” Bolseth says in a press release. “As the threat landscape grows and organizations struggle to keep up, the ability for teams to offload deployments as well as the ongoing risk and responsibility to experts is invaluable.”
Recent headlines of data breaches serve as an “unsettling reminder” that the world’s largest and most influential companies are susceptible, says Mordecai Rosen, the CEO of Digital Guardian. “It’s why data classification and DLP remain critical components of a comprehensive cybersecurity program,” he says, “and the combination of Digital Guardian and HelpSystems will provide all our customers, regardless of their size, the opportunity to implement world class data protection solutions.”
Digital Guardian marks HelpSystems 12th security-related acquisition of the past three years. Starting with its acquisition of Core Security in February 2019, HelpSystems nabbed a string of security firms, including Clearswift (December 2019), Strategic Cyber (March 2020), Titus (June 2020), Boldon James (June 2020), Vera (December 2020), File Catalyst (January 2021), Digital Defense (February 2021), Beyond Security and Agari (June 2021), and PhishLabs (October 2021).
Terms of the acquisition were not shared.
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