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Digital Guardian

Score9 out of 10

3 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Digital Guardian?

The Digital Guardian Platform from Fortra (formerly HelpSystems, acquired in late 2021) is a cloud-delivered data protection platform purpose-built to stop data loss by both insiders and outsiders on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Additionally, Digital Guardian User Activity Monitoring enables users to detect, investigate and mitigate suspicious user actions to ensure sensitive data doesn’t get out. And Digital Guardian for Data Discovery provides visibility and auditing of sensitive data at rest across the enterprise.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Digital Guardian.
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Determined, Professional, and Sensitive Data Monitoring Program.

Incentivized
Rita JoyView profile
Information Specialist in Information Technology at ASE Consulting (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Digital Guardian is a personalized solution that avoids, or eliminates the chances of data losses, with an inbuilt capacity for constant screening and digital evaluation. Further, Digital Guardian is a cloud deployed or delivered tool, with elastic scalability or customization. Besides, Digital Guardian covers all devices and systems, from Linux, Windows, and others. Again, the tool has the deepest visibility, which makes the access of every sensitive data [renowned] and efficient.

Pros

  • Digital Guardian provides a comprehensive classification, more so for database efficiency.
  • Besides, Digital Guardian has flexible controls for screening and business eligibility.
  • Lastly, Digital Guardian monitors all the actions that individuals commit in a company.

Cons

  • Digital Guardian is perfect in database protection, hence, no complaint.
  • Digital Guardian makes the detection process effective, hence, reliable.
  • Finally, Digital Guardian is cloud focused or delivered, hence, concrete and efficient.

Most Important Features

  • Digital Guardian is cloud deployed or delivered, hence, efficient.
  • Besides, Digital Guardian has professionals to detect any cyber security or threat.
  • Finally, Digital Guardian creates an endpoint coverage, very progressive and rational.

Return on Investment

  • The professional threat detectors and cyber security analysts [increase] the reliability of the company database.
  • Cloud coverage allows easy deployment and efficient systematic controls.
  • Lastly, Digital Guardian [values] and monitors the procedures or the roles that every player makes in the company.

Alternatives Considered

Symantec Data Loss Prevention

Other Software Used

Column Information Security, ConvergePoint Health and Safety Software, Auconet Network Access Control

Digital Guardian - Proceed with Caution

Incentivized
Kurt FergusonView profile
Lead Desktop Analyst in Information Technology at Fidelity & Guaranty Life (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Email data leaks - DLP software must prevent certain actions to work well. Let's say you try to copy and paste an SS # to an email, or upload sensitive data to your personal email account. Guardian Edge can prevent that, and then alert administrators that it happened
  • Unauthorized file copies - Guardian Edge can also prevent users from copying files from a sensitive restricted area to somewhere else where they might be able to more easily exfiltrate it. A good example would be from a company file share to a less secure server or their own home drive
  • Alerting Administrators of suspicious activities - Any time a user uploads a file to an upload service or personal email, it is logged and reported as an event to be reviewed. If it found nothing in scanning the data, it will still notify you that it happened so you can review it yourself to confirm it wasn't a false negative.

Cons

  • Program Conflicts - DLP software can often cause undesirable effects in programs, and Digital Guardian is no exception here. We had substantial issues with it locking up Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel.
  • Excessive false positives - If you don't tune the software properly, you may end up reviewing a lot of non-critical items, and that can lead to lots of extra admin time for fairly benign occurrences.
  • Frequent program updates - Digital Guardian issues hotfixes and patches for their software frequently, and often times those updates will fix one problem, but cause another problem
  • Reverting to older versions - We frequently had to revert to older versions after testing a fix for an issue, because the new fix would break something else. This became very frustrating to end users, administrators, and management.

Return on Investment

  • Lost work hours - We lost lots of work hours due to admins having to troubleshoot program issues, and also manually remove DG agents from machines so that users could get back to work.
  • No DLP protection because we had to mass uninstall it - We ended up pulling DG from our entire environment because of the problems it caused with Excel and Outlook. DG acknowledged this was absolutely their fault, but it took them quite a while to issue a fix, and the first several did not actually resolve the problem. We simply did not have the time or patience to beta test their software for them. As a result, our users have to run with no DLP protection, just so they can actually work.
  • Negative perception of IT - DG actually ended up giving the IT Department quite a black eye. Users were nervous any time we mentioned we were doing software maintenance or patching, because they were fearful that some new problem was going to be introduced and they wouldn't be able to do their jobs. It has taken time and many hours to repair that trust.