Next Named a “Trail Blazer” in Radicati Market Quadrant 2023

According to the report, Trail Blazers are vendors who "offer advanced, best of breed technology, in some areas of their solutions..." and "have the potential for 'disrupting' the market with new technology or new delivery models. In time, these vendors are most likely to grow into Top Players."

Next is a provider of data protection solutions aimed at uncovering user risk, educating users and fulfilling security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Next’s platform, Reveal, is a cloud-based subscription service which offers a low-profile, self-auditing endpoint agent which can co-exist with other endpoint applications. Reveal leverages machine learning on the endpoint to analyze user behavior and stop data loss. Through real-time classification and automated user guidance, it reinforces data security at the point of risk.

• Low profile endpoint agent
• Delivers protection via personalized behavior analytics and ML on the endpoint
• Self-auditing, automatically generates performance reports for system admins
• Provides visibility into endpoint activities without the need for policies
• Allows robust monitoring and controls through specifically defined policies
• Supports Windows, macOS, Linux endpoints and servers
• Single management console for all product capabilities: agent deployment, reporting, analysis, ongoing system administration, etc.
• Enables MSSP partners to manage multiple customers/tenants using a common white labeled console
• Managed services
• Aimed at mid-market organizations

• Cloud-based subscription service, no on-prem or hybrid deployments
• No data-at-rest scanning (Next considers it a vestige of legacy DLP solutions, opting to inspect content as it is being used, removing the need to scan and fingerprint data at rest)
• Full CASB capabilities through API integration with third-party solutions are on the vendor’s roadmap
• Limited Mobile DLP capabilities
• Customers indicated admin interface and reporting capabilities could be improved

We believe the approach taken by legacy DLP solutions is a poor fit with the tech stacks in modern organizations and today’s threat space. Solutions designed for on-premises applications and data stores struggle to adapt to a work-from-anywhere world and cloud native environments. Building complex and granular rules to anticipate and govern what actions each class of users can take with each category of data requires a level of staffing and overhead that is incompatible with rapidly changing businesses. Pre-classifying all data within an organization before taking any steps to protect data simply delays time to value.

Radicati’s ranking validates our strategic vision of helping organizations educate users to protect data and moving intelligence to the endpoint. They cite some of Reveal’s key features in support of this ranking, including:

• Machine Learning on the Endpoint to tailor a baseline for each user. They note that pushing this intelligence to the endpoint eliminates the requirement for  “a network connection to collect data, establish patterns, analyze behavior, and enforce policies.”
• Real-time Data Classification and contextual inspections which “identifies sensitive data in both structured and unstructured forms without the need for predefined policies.” 
• Privacy by design and pseudonymization to mitigate threats while protecting user privacy and limiting bias in monitoring activity.
• Incident-based Training “helps users make safer decisions” and “reinforce corporate policies.”
• Policy-free Visibility “autonomously evaluates content and context to classify data as it is created, used and moved.”

We built Reveal to work well in a modern technology and threat environment. Radicati acknowledges this in our support of all leading operating systems and how our lightweight agents leverage machine learning on each endpoint to “deliver protection via personalized user behavior analytics.”  We believe bringing the intelligence provided by machine learning to activity by each user on each endpoint is critical to providing protection (and value) quickly. All users present risk. Establishing a risk profile for each user can be done efficiently by moving intelligence to endpoints. Further, because Reveal’s behavioral analysis works autonomously on the endpoint, protecting data does not rely on a network connection to a separate analysis engine.
 
Another design choice noted by Radicati is our self-diagnosing and non-intrusive agents. Users of DLP solutions are all too familiar with agent conflicts that can result in system crashes and performance overhead. Radicati cites as a strength our “low-profile endpoint agent” that “automatically generates performance reports for inspection by system administrators.”
 
We find it interesting that Radicati finds it a “weakness” that we offer Reveal only as a cloud-based service. While many legacy DLP solutions still offer an on-premises solution, we believe that cloud-first is a requirement for the growing number of organizations that prioritize rapid time to value and lower ongoing overhead. This is particularly true for mid-market organizations.