Data-loss prevention market booming - Military Careers, Second Careers - Air Force Times

Data-loss prevention market booming

Put Palisade Systems’ “big brother” software on your company’s network and Kurt Shedenhelm swears it’ll find something you won’t like.

Confidential information being sent out. Copyrighted music or videos coming in. Employees visiting inappropriate Web sites. Data being shared, either maliciously or by accident, that could draw steep fines for the company should regulators find out.

“Within an hour of our software being installed, we usually find a hundred violations,” said Shedenhelm, president of Palisade Systems in Ames, Iowa, which provides monitoring and filtering solutions for businesses. “It’s amazing what it can do. Most of our clients are shocked by what they learn.”

The “data loss prevention” market is in many ways the result of a shift to more defensive thinking in tech security. For years, much focus was placed on keeping threats out by building firewalls and using other tools to thwart hackers.

Now companies are looking within, and realizing insider threats can be just as harmful, Shedenhelm said. The data loss prevention market has grown from $10 million in 2004 to more than $150 million this year, according to analysts and trade publications.

“It’s become a huge liability issue for businesses,” said Shedenhelm, 42, whose company has grown from 14 employees to 22 in two years and now serves 500 customers in the United States and Europe. “If you lose private information, no matter what, the government can make you pay.”

Palisade Systems’ technology, called PacketSure, is a box attached to the main entry point of the network, where it can be “trained” to monitor every scrap of data moving through the company’s systems. Shedenhelm said the product will protect account numbers, patient histories, Social Security numbers and other sensitive information commonly kept on networks. Anyone trying to send out the protected data is unable to do so, and a report is generated for the company’s supervisors.

The recent loss of more than 45 million credit card numbers at retail chain TJ Maxx, for example, could have been prevented with PacketSure, Shedenhelm said. Even if hackers are able to access a company’s network, as they did in that widely publicized case, the Palisade technology prevents any sensitive material from leaving it.

“We are like the big brother out there on your network, enforcing your policies,” Shedenhelm said. “Whatever you tell it to look out for, it will.”

Of course, nearly all cases of internal data loss happen by accident or without malice, Shedenhelm said. Some companies use the Palisade technology simply to monitor employees’ activity on the Web. This can boost performance and free up precious bandwidth, he said.

Chris Ollila, vice present of technology at DSI Systems in Des Moines, said about nine months ago his team suspected there was “a lot of nonbusiness Internet usage” going on throughout the company. The satellite and electronics distributor, which employs about 400 people, already had a policy on Internet use during company time.

Ollila said the staff was reminded of it before PacketSure was installed.

Employees were then told that the new technology would be monitoring Web use and certain sites would be restricted.

“We immediately noticed a significant change in our bandwidth utilization,” Ollila said, noting that most of the employees’ activity had been music and video streaming. “Productivity immediately improved as a result ... it was exactly what we needed.”

Sometimes, though, the technology is too smart. Shedenhelm said when working with companies that want to protect a top-secret recipe, for example, the Palisade technology must learn how to recognize what a recipe looks like.

“That means it’ll probably block that cookie recipe you’re trying to e-mail to your mom,” he laughed. “So you might want to just pick up the phone.”