GigaOm Positions Reveal as an Outperformer and Market Leader

GigaOm is a research firm that provides engineering-led technology research to “enable businesses to innovate at the speed of the market by helping them to grasp new technologies.” This week, they published their third annual GigaOm Radar for Data Loss Prevention. The Radar Report “highlights key DLP vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements.”

Recognizing our growing market presence, GigaOm invited Next to participate in the evaluation for the first time. We are proud to announce that Reveal was listed as an “Outperformer” in the market leader category. In GigaOm’s words, Reveal is a “Leader in the Innovation half of the Radar, showing both a good range of capabilities and rapid innovation.”

We’re glad to make a grand entrance!

Evaluation Criteria

GigaOm researchers are IT/IS professionals from leading companies and use their experience as practitioners to evaluate mature and emerging technologies. They call out four key criteria for a modern DLP solution:

1. Data location: Tools should cover the range of locations where data might exist in an organization. These locations include on-premises, in the cloud, in SaaS solutions, at endpoints, and in mobile devices.
2. Contextual awareness: It’s important that tools apply context to how data is used rather than rely solely on classifications and sensitive data types.
3. Insider risk awareness: Many solutions can identify suspicious internal activity, but not all can take action to mitigate the risk of data loss when suspicious behavior is flagged.
4. Audio/video/image data exfiltration: This is an emerging technology but one that’s becoming increasingly important for DLP tools to support to prevent sensitive data from leaving the organization.

Evaluation Ratings

GigaOm has four possible ratings for each criteria:

+++ Exceptional: Outstanding focus and execution

++ Capable: Good but with room for improvement

+ Limited: Lacking in execution and use cases

– : Not applicable or absent

Market Categories

Reveal is rated as Exceptional for MSPs and mid-market organizations with 500 to 3,500 endpoints. GigaOm researchers also note Reveal’s ability “to scale to support 150,000 endpoints in a single tenant.” GigaOm’s rating affirms our ability to protect businesses of all sizes and stands in contrast to many of the legacy DLP players who fail to show this level of scalability in their solutions.

Key Criteria

GigaOm provides details on eight key criteria that organizations should consider when evaluating DLP solutions. Reveal was rated Exceptional or Capable in all eight. Criteria include:

• Contextual Awareness
• Service Desk & SIEM Tool Integrations
• Service Integrations
• Automation & Orchestration
• Reporting & Analytics
• Extended User Education
• Insider Risk Awareness
• Predictive Analytics

The report highlights Reveal’s strengths. Researchers were impressed by Reveal’s ability to provide contextual awareness, calling out the platform’s breadth of “indicators to build a detailed contextual understanding that accurately identifies threats.” They also noted our approach for extended user education, namely our ability to customize end-user prompts to alert on potentially risky behavior and to educate them on and reinforce company policy when it occurs. Finally, GigaOm lauded Reveal’s reporting and analytics, highlighting “customizable dashboards that enable analysts to quickly build reports and investigate potential data loss risks.”

Evaluation Metrics

Organizations want to protect their sensitive data without overwhelming scarce security resources. This desire requires a simple solution to deploy and manage, providing rapid time to value and return on investment.

GigaOm rated Reveal as exceptional for three of the four Evaluation Metrics. They cite Reveal’s ability to “provide immediate insight into data movement and user activity across all managed endpoints” and ”minimize the impact on performance of user workflows.” Ease of adoption is simplified by “the ability to identify sensitive data and user behavior without initial policy definition, as well as by applying content and context classification on the fly, removing the need for pre-scanning of data sets.” We would point out that this also dramatically speeds up time to value, as teams do not need to spend months classifying data before it is protected.

Emerging Technologies Comparison

As the workplace and threat space evolve, so too must DLP solutions. GigaOm cites three areas of concern: Privacy Regulatory Compliance, API Integrations, and Audio/Video/Image Data Exfiltration. Reveal was the only solution to receive “Exceptional” ratings in all three categories.

Privacy Regulatory Compliance

Privacy is an increasingly essential and stringent regulatory requirement. When developing Reveal, we took a privacy-by-design approach, which GigaOm recognized. It uses pseudonymization while detecting and mitigating threats without compromising users' privacy and preventing bias in monitoring users’ activities. Reveal’s Scoped Investigations feature limits what an investigator is allowed to see and for how long, mitigating the unfettered monitoring of individuals and reducing bias.

API Integrations

In the information security ecosystem, stand-alone platforms often cause more problems than they solve. APIs allow solutions to communicate via standards-based and supported connections. Reveal’s API and SIEM streaming service provide a simple configuration process that enables organizations to reduce response times by ingesting detections into their existing SIEM tools and workflows.

Audio/Video/Image Data Exfiltration

Sensitive information is no longer restricted to text files; the growth of audio and video in business presents a new data loss vector. Reveal’s on-use data classification automatically identifies sensitive data in structured and unstructured formats, including image files, screen captures, and web applications.

Reveal is Built for Today’s Business Needs

We found the Analyst’s Take section particularly interesting. They talk about how DLP vendors must continue “ to work hard to overcome some of the traditional challenges associated with DLP adoption.” He includes:

• Policy-free identification of sensitive information and risky behavior 
• Immediate visibility is a core feature of Reveal. Legacy DLP solutions require organizations to pre-classify all sensitive data and build granular usage rules. Pre-classifying data delays time to value and protection while increasing expenses and overhead. Reveal eliminates the need for pre-classification and accelerates time to value. By moving machine learning to each endpoint, Reveal can automatically identify and classify sensitive data as it is created or accessed.
• Using analytics instead of “large libraries of sensitive data types and rules” 
• Reveal’s policy-free approach eliminates workflow disruptions due to outdated policy creation and management practices. Machine learning on each endpoint allows Reveal to baseline each user in days instead of months to understand acceptable behavior and report on risks to data without preset rules. Because it’s on the endpoint, data is protected even when the user is offline.
• Ease adoption with SaaS-based solutions 
• Reveal was “born in the cloud.” We built it with cloud-native infrastructure using sanctioned practices for today’s technology stack. Reveal can be deployed in minutes and begins identifying and protecting data immediately.
• Addressing new data loss threat vectors 
• Sensitive data is found in Office documents, messaging applications, and databases. As noted, Reveal was rated as “Exceptional” in the Audio/Video/Image Data Exfiltration criteria. Reveal can identify, classify, and protect data in all its formats, including unstructured data like documents, presentations, telephone recordings, image files, social media postings, and messaging texts.

See Reveal in Action

We are pleased with our showing in the GigaOm report. You can download the full report here. Better yet, contact us for a demo.