orcepoint has announced what it believes to be the industry’s first Risk-Adaptive Protection solution, Dynamic Data Protection in response to challenges in balancing user and data security with business productivity.
Legacy cybersecurity solutions today rely on traditional threat blocking and static assessments that not only introduce security friction into business transactions but also overwhelm security analysts with millions of alerts from threats.
Built to address the barrage of complex and sophisticated threats facing organisations today, Forcepoint’s Risk-Adaptive Protection continuously assesses risk and automatically provides proportional enforcement that can be dialed up or down.
Forcepoint regional manager: sub-Saharan Africa Christo van Staden says this capability is enabled through the power of human-centric behavior analytics that understand interactions with data across users, machines and accounts.
“Intelligent context speeds decision-making and security controls specific to changing risk in enterprise networks. With the industry’s first automated enforcement capability that dynamically adapts, security analysts are now freed to focus on high value activities and eliminate the backlog of alerts from traditional security tools,” he explains.
More importantly, CISOs and CIOs can also reduce traditional security friction pain points to enable productivity gains and business success, while also reducing the time required to detect and mitigate risk from days or months to a matter of seconds.
“The challenge with many security tools today is that they are static — they don’t adjust to account for different types of users and transactions — and they are also binary: either allow fully or block completely,” says Garrett Bekker, principal security analyst at 451 Research.
“However, in a world of IT-enabled services delivered anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud, a risk-based approach that is continuously assessed and adaptively enforced can allow for more granular policy responses that can lead to more effective protection against breaches,” he concludes.
Available later this quarter, Forcepoint’s Dynamic Data Protection is the company’s first Risk-Adaptive Protection solution offering. It surpasses legacy data loss prevention (DLP) offerings to uniquely deliver next-generation data protection that adaptively shapes and enforces security policies across enterprise endpoints or devices, without requiring administrator intervention.
With human-centric behaviour-analytics at its core, Forcepoint Dynamic Data Protection applies an anonymous and continuously updated behavioral risk score to establish a baseline of “normal” behavior of each end-user on corporate or unmanaged networks.
Forcepoint’s intelligent systems, informed by the individual risk assessment, then apply a range of security countermeasures to address the identified risk. For example, Forcepoint Dynamic Data Protection can allow and monitor data access, allow access but encrypt downloads, or fully block access to sensitive files depending on the context of individual interactions with corporate data and the resulting risk score.
Van Staden says an organisation’s ability to automatically adapt enforcement policy to the most significant risk can mean the difference between protecting critical customer data, intellectual property and even mission success.
“As sophisticated cyber threats continue to rise, the lack of proper data protection has directly led to enterprises spending millions to restore lost data and productivity as well as customer trust,” he adds.
“Escalating data breaches, stolen identities and abuses of privacy have underscored the need for a new way to continuously assess cyber behavior to protect users and data,” says Matthew Moynahan, CEO at Forcepoint.