Broadcom DLP: What's a better alternative?

A company’s data resources are its most valuable asset. A data breach involving sensitive information can be extremely damaging to a company’s finances and reputation, therefore, organizations will spend considerable resources to protect data from loss or misuse. One effective method of enhancing data security is leveraging data loss prevention (DLP) software.

What is Broadcom DLP?

Broadcom has a modern DLP tool that is marketed under the Symantec name. Symantec’s DLP tool was acquired by Broadcom in 2019 as part of a 10.7 billion dollar acquisition of Symantec’s Enterprise Security Business.

Below, we’ll take a look at the features of Broadcom’s DLP tool and also look at an alternative from Next DLP that may offer companies enhanced data protection.

Features of Broadcom's DLP solution

Broadcom’s DLP solution, Symantec DLP, is a data loss prevention solution that protects organizations from data loss or misuse. It can also be used to maintain regulatory compliance over sensitive data resources, mitigate and minimize data breaches, and control the flow of information throughout a company.

This DLP solution offers users data discovery and monitoring features to effectively protect their data resources, as well as policy management, incident response, reporting, and administration from a consolidated interface.

Broadcom DLP (Symantec DLP) is built upon four foundational pillars of data loss prevention:

Critical data protection safeguards sensitive and high-risk data from data breaches or accidental misuse.
Visibility and control over data resources at rest and in transit are provided by monitoring data in the cloud, at endpoints, in storage, and during transmission.
A unified policy framework is promoted by the tool to reduce the complexity of identifying and remediating on-premises and cloud-based incidents.
Regulatory compliance is facilitated with complete support for data security and privacy regulations.

Building on its foundational pillars, Broadcom DLP can be deployed in a wide variety of usage scenarios for large and small businesses. The following are some typical use cases for Broadcom’s Symantec DLP.

Monitoring data movement across the computing environment

Broadcom DLP monitors data movement and can provide information on how sensitive resources are accessed and transmitted. The tool scans endpoints, cloud applications, cloud storage, and all other infrastructure components to provide complete visibility into data usage. Symantec’s monitoring capabilities include:

Monitoring of high-risk data transmission
Inspecting emails to locate confidential data
Scanning, detection, and real-time monitoring of local devices
Blocking forbidden actions and triggering pop-up windows that inform users why the action was halted

Eliminating data breaches

Broadcom’s DLP, Symantec DLP, prevents and eliminates data breaches by intercepting attacks by cybercriminals and blocking potentially harmful actions by employees. This is accomplished by enforcing an overall data protection policy designed to protect high-risk information from being compromised or misused.

The solution blocks accidental and deliberate attempts to access sensitive information, helping to eliminate leaks caused by inexperienced users. Broadcom DLP also monitors data in real-time to uncover any risky activity.

Data discovery

Broadcom DLP scans all data repositories, including network file shares and endpoints, to discover where sensitive information resides. By employing advanced content-aware detection technology, it reduces the occurrence of false negatives or positives for improved data protection.

The tool uses multiple data classification techniques, including:

Indexed document matching
Described content matching
File-type detection
Exact data matching
Sensitive imagery recognition

Maintaining regulatory compliance

DLP solutions need to have the capability to assist with enforcing regulatory compliance with standards like PCI-DSS or HIPAA. Broadcom DLP addresses compliance with multiple features that include:

Locating sensitive information with predefined policy templates and data identifiers
Monitoring all sensitive data resources to detect policy violations and controlling how and where high-risk data is stored and used

Remediating incidents

Broadcom DLP automates incident response procedures with multiple features, including:

Performing User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) and assigning a risk score to behaviors and individuals
Routing emails to encryption gateways to protect information
Integrating with ServiceNow to streamline issue resolution
Enforcing encryption and digital rights management for files transferred to USB devices
Redirecting or blocking messages based on their content or attributes

What's a better data loss prevention solution?

Next DLP offers a modern approach to data loss prevention in our Reveal product. Features include the ability to classify data in real-time as it is created or ingested into the environment, as well as on-the-fly context-based classification that determines data sensitivity based on who or which application generated it.

Reveal is a cloud-native and people-centric DLP solution that simplifies the task of protecting enterprise data. Easy to install and use by everyone in the organization, it leverages machine learning and smart remediation to provide immediate benefits right out of the box — and its lightweight agents for Windows, macOS, and Linux machines won’t impact productivity. The tool even protects sensitive endpoint data when the user is disconnected from the network, making it an ideal DLP solution for today’s remote and hybrid teams.

Additional features include customizable data protection policy templates and incident-based user training — triggered by policy violations — to improve data security and help employees understand how to use enterprise information correctly. Reveal also generates informative reports on attempts to access sensitive information so insufficient security controls can be adjusted.

Other DLP Tool Alternatives: