Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention Reviews

We are a solution provider and Forcepoint DLP is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We have Forcepoint DLP at one of the telcos and one of the things that we are trying to discover is information, across the organization, that is of a personal nature. We are using it to comply with POPI, which is the equivalent of GDPR in South Africa. We are also using it for PCI-DSS requirements. This discovery component works quite well with respect to the search.

When we deployed it for a bank, it proved highly efficient in terms of PCI compliance. It was very quick to pick up where people were divulging personal information regarding credit card holders. We then deployed very simple rules that we had customized, without the need for data classification.

Initially, if you were just doing PCI-DSS, because it's very limited information that you needed to protect, you could do it without data classification. This was good for an organization that had data to protect and wanted to comply with PCI-DSS, but had not done the data classification at that point.

The rules that we put into place were simple. For example, if more than two credit card numbers are being pushed out then block it, or first put it into monitoring mode and then block it.

One thing that I really like is that you can customize the rules. 

The challenges that we've had are related to deployment, especially around the discovery component, and with the local support that we receive in South Africa.

With respect to the discovery component, the reports are very hard to interpret because they come out in an illogical format. We forwarded the reports to our local support team, who were also unable to help me. Eventually, the problem went to the UK for that team to interpret the report.

Ultimately, my biggest challenge is the discovery component with respect to the reports, as good as it is in terms of the integrity, or the search. It is a question of how you translate technical reports into business language. We tried the cloud version, which is Forcepoint CASB, and we found the same thing.

The local support team is made up more of salespeople than engineers and as such, the support in South Africa can be improved.

My experience with Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention goes back to 2005 when it was still called PortAuthority. The product has evolved massively since that time. I have deployed it and worked with it for different organizations at different locations.

Initially, it takes a little bit of processing but nothing to be too concerned about. Stability-wise, nothing has really annoyed us. 

The scalability is fantastic. One of the things that I like about Forcepoint is that I can customize the solution to suit my objectives. For example, if I only wanted to prevent PCI then I could just go in and do that.

One of my clients has quite a large deployment, with approximately 30,000 users. They have plans to roll it out to the rest of Africa.

Technical support from the UK is good. However, the experience of local support in South Africa is not at the level it should be. Most of the local staff are salespeople, as opposed to engineers. Support for the deployment of the product is seriously lacking.

In the UK, they were much more knowledgeable about the product, as well as the outputs and how to actually read them to make business sense out of them. It was much better than what we had in South Africa. Locally, they simply said that they didn't understand it. Most customers will shy away from products when the support is like this.

Because they answer the phone, I would rate the local support a two out of ten. The European support was better, so I would rate them a five out of ten. There were delays in their response but I'm not sure if it was related to the difference in time, or it was part of the ticket escalation process.

One of our clients was using the Symantec solution prior to Forcepoint. We convinced them to switch because Symantec does not have a great presence in South Africa and support was an issue.

They had been using it for quite a long time and had not seen the necessary return on investment. With the new legislation, it was time for them to change to something that was more practical, and more user-friendly. The product works great now.

The implementation is not as easy as people make it out to be. Once you get it right, the product is fine, but this requires understanding it and getting the proper training. A novice that has begun to work with the tool can find it quite difficult to implement if they don't have a good understanding of the product, and do not have the right support.

For example, in one organization it took us about three months to implement it, whereas it should have taken about a month.

Our clients have hybrid deployments, where they are part on-premises and part cloud. The choice of cloud provider is made by the client but they either choose Microsoft Azure or AWS.

The implementation strategy that we use varies depending on the client. For example, at the bank, we wanted to prevent data breaches, especially with credit card information, and ensure compliance. Therefore, our strategy was focused on just the PCI requirements so that we could take reasonable measures to protect the organization. Essentially, we wanted to go from zero to hero quite quickly. That was possible because of the flexibility and agility of the product.

When it came to the telco, it was a completely different strategy. It was a long-term strategy in terms of protection of personal information and preventing it from being divulged without authority to would-be criminals.

When we deployed it, we literally had to look at the requirements and configure it from a POPI perspective. In this regard, the deployment was skewed toward personal information breaches.

We worked with a local reseller, Performanta.

Their skills were meant to be the best in the country but it left a lot to be desired. We had to use the UK offices and that's a challenge with most of the organizations in South Africa. With big vendors, South Africa is a small market, so the investment in South Africa is not what it should be. Understanding, managing, and integrating products needs to be improved, in general.

For deployment, there were eight of us in total. Two were engineers, there were four analysts because we had to write the business rules and document them, there was a project manager and a few others.

Maintenance is being done by the client, in-house. They have two engineers that are responsible for it, and they have purchased support from the local providers.

My clients are seeing ROI because the privacy office is quite comfortable now that they've done everything reasonable to meet the compliance requirements. There is a level of assurance provided by the DLP solution.

In terms of pricing, it is good for a corporation but they do not cater to small to medium businesses. They have to look at a different pricing structure for small to medium-sized enterprises because the cost is too high.

This is compounded for the African market because of the exchange rate. One dollar is equal to approximately 15 rands and if you were to multiply that by the price of the product, it becomes quite costly.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing feed, although you still need to understand the operational impact that it has on an organization from a resource perspective. That needs to be factored into the total cost of ownership.

We compared Forcepoint with NetSkope to assess its reporting capabilities and we found that the NetSkope report was very easy to translate, understand, and explain to a business. Forcepoint was instead very cumbersome, unstructured, and illogical. It required an expert to actually interpret the report, which is something that you don't want.

We have also looked at the McAfee product, as well as the one from Microsoft. At that stage, the solution from Microsoft was a little immature and I have not looked at it since. Forcepoint was the leader when we implemented it for our clients.

Comparing Forcepoint to the other products in general, the data discovery capability was great, except for the interpretation of the report. The OCR capabilities were also good for us because it's a telco and they have a lot of paper going through. 

The tool works great but they don't talk about the operationalization of the tool from a process perspective. When people sell DLP solutions, they talk about the efficiency of the tool, but they don't talk about the impact that it has on an organization from a resource perspective.

You would need a team to analyze all of the exceptions that you have, like the way they do in a SOC, where you have analysts looking at the incident. They analyze and investigate it, and then determine whether it is positive or negative and something that we have to be worried about. For example, our organization had approximately 70,000 end-users, who were employees. There is quite a large amount of data that is transferred across our network.

In our case, if a person is sending more than one credit card credential out of the bank, it was flagged. If it was more than one, you had to have a whole backend process where the analyst had to look at it, then perhaps ask the person why they were sending out this information.

When we were first looking at this product, there was nobody who informed the customer as to the complete ecosystem that would be required to have an effective DLP solution in play.

My advice for anybody who is looking at Forcepoint is that they need to understand what it is that they are trying to prevent. You cannot be totally dependent on the tool to do everything. This is not a criticism of Forcepoint but rather, a criticism of the way it's sold. The product will do what it's built to do. But, if you're expecting it to automatically manage the incident, then it cannot do everything. It can block, it can monitor, and it can create alerts, but you still need your analysts. For most CSOs or IT managers that are looking to deploy, they must factor in the practical implications of operationalizing it. They need to have a process in place. They need to have an escalation process in place, and they need to have resources like analysts to actually look at the exception reports.

This is an effective data leakage solution, it does what it's meant to be doing, and the interfaces are great. The biggest lesson that I have learned from using it is to understand the total cost of ownership.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We do managed services. We analyze customers' requirements, and then we suggest a proper DLP or endpoint data protection solution. We have implemented Forcepoint DLP and Forcepoint Web Gateway for multiple customers.

Forcepoint DLP helped a lot when an incident was created and we tried to have an auto-remediation of the incident. For DLP, an incident is a key factor. DLP is meant to generate an incident, and that incident should be managed. If no one is managing the incident, DLP is of no use. Forcepoint has an email workflow. It provides email incident remediation wherein an automatic email is generated for the manager. If a person violates a policy, we can configure it in a way that one email is sent to the manager. One email will also go to the end-user. The end-user can again analyze the activity and give us feedback about whether it was a genuine business need and we should release that email, or whether it was a mistake and we should quarantine that email. The decision is made by the manager or by the end-user who sent the email. This helped a lot and reduced the incident count. It was very helpful to have such a report and to be able to say that the end-user was aware of the fact that this email has been quarantined. After providing the legal justification, the email was released by him. It reduced 40% of incidents for emails. This kind of feature is not available in other DLP solutions, and I really appreciate having that feature.

The workflow remediation is quite good. That is a key feature because of which it has the upper hand over other DLP solutions.

Endpoint protection, web protection, network protection, and storage use are valuable features. Among these, endpoint protection is most valuable.

It has good policies and good mechanisms to detect incidents.

They can have less memory consumption for their endpoint channels. They are not that adaptive with other endpoints solutions like EPP and EDR. They can improve in this aspect. 

Their discovery or the way they discover the data at risk can also be improved. There are many database servers that are not supported by Forcepoint.

Their login mechanism to find out the issue is another thing they need to improve. We would like to have the finest login to figure out what exactly is happening and why we are not able to communicate with the detection server. One of the products I have used is better in this aspect. We can have the finest level login, and we can figure it out, but I haven't found such an option in Forcepoint. 

I have been into DLP technology for the last eight years. I have been using Forcepoint for three years.

I have worked with another DLP solution in and out, and I find that solution to be more stable than Forcepoint. Once you implement a policy in that solution, the policy will always function. You can be assured that the policy will be functional. With Forcepoint, I always need to check whether the policy is functional or not and whether my policy is getting synchronized on the detection server or not. There won't be any sort of end trigger if the policy synchronization was stopped. 

It is quite scalable. It is comparable to other DLP solutions in terms of scalability.

I haven't interacted that much with their support, but whenever I created a case, there was proper support. As compared to other solutions, Forcepoint's support is more technical and professional.

I have used other solutions. Many of the customers are switching to Forcepoint. They are not getting proper support from one of the vendors. So, they are switching to Forcepoint. They are getting equal or more benefits with Forcepoint, and its cost is also low.

Incident remediation is awesome in Forcepoint. One of the solutions that I used did not have incident remediation. Forcepoint again has the upper hand in terms of policies. It has nearly 1,700 policy templates that we can use. Many compliance-related and PII-related rules are readily available in those templates. Forcepoint also has a time-based policy, wherein they can detect that a policy is active within a certain period of time. This visibility is not there in other solutions. Forcepoint also supports flow data transfer analysis.

Overall, Forcepoint DLP has the upper hand. Stability and scalability are secondary. The primary thing is that an application should be usable. Forcepoint is really user-friendly, and it has multiple options. They say that they can detect the malware if data leakage is happening to malware. They do have some sort of analysis in their detection engine to detect malware.

As compared to other DLP solutions, it is quite complex because they do have their policy server and analytics server in place, and their Forcepoint manager is also there. With other solutions, we need to have an Oracle Database in place, which is not required with Forcepoint. For Forcepoint, SQL Server can be quickly installed and is ready for use.

The installation duration depends on the organization and the size of the organization. For the same set of organizations, Forcepoint will take 30% less time as compared to others. In many organizations, I have implemented it within a month, and in many organizations, the project took one year.

The implementation strategy depends on the customer, but we do follow the implementation steps, such as gathering information and then deciding which detection server to go for, where to place it, and how many counts are required. If I have more than 30,000 agents, then I definitely need to think about one more endpoint prevent server. So, it depends on the organization size and the response of the organization in terms of how quickly they adapt DLP and how friendly they are with the DLP solution. The biggest implementation that we had done had 30,000 users.

Our customers have seen an ROI. 

Its pricing is quite low considering the features they are offering. As compared to other solutions, it is reasonable. 

They do have professional support. If we need professional support, then there will be additional costs.

You definitely need to do a proper calibration of the organization and data flow analysis. Even though there are 1,700 policy templates, each and every organization will have a different set of rules and data to be analyzed. So, data flow analysis is a must with Forcepoint DLP to create a proper policy.

Cost-wise, it is a very good product. An organization should really consider this product if they are in process of DLP implementation, or if they are thinking of switching from any other DLP solution. If there is a budget constraint or you need a good DLP solution, I would definitely recommend Forcepoint DLP.

I would rate Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention an eight out of 10. There is no DLP that will score a 10.

We use it mostly for endpoint protection of PCI information, as well as PII, such as social security numbers.

We have a hybrid system, in that we utilize the cloud as well as our on-premises appliances. Depending on where the customer is, if they're on-premises or if they're working from home or elsewhere, we have that covered with the hybrid solution. Forcepoint has its product available in the cloud and we use the on-premises side when the data is going through the appliances.

The greatest benefit is the detection, detecting either accidental or unauthorized transmission of certain kinds of PCI or PII data that we prohibit. It's very useful to get that from alerts. We can also block them outright, depending on what threshold we have set. That's the most useful thing about DLP, that it prevents unauthorized usage of that kind of data.

Some of the built-in rules, templates, and content classifiers are among the most valuable features. Some of the built-in patterns are good places to get started with. Along with the phrases, they are helpful in putting together policies and fine-tuning our policies. A good example of that would be certain kinds of credit card data. They have a lot of algorithms available to fine-tune what exactly you're looking for, whether it be credit cards from Mexico, or US credit cards, et cetera. They have a good database of those types of predefined algorithms, ways to detect things, and the specific information you're looking for.

These features are valuable because they work and seem to be picking up the right data. They seem accurate. It's also convenient to be able to choose them and not have to figure it out myself or create my own. That goes a long way toward fine-tuning our policies.

The user-friendliness of the interface in formulating DLP policies could be improved. An example would be managing policies. It's a little daunting at first, and can be confusing, at times, when it comes to how to set things up and how to add policies. They could improve on that.

Overall, I would like to see them modernize. I'm on version 8.5, so there are newer versions out. They may have done that already. I'd have to demo the newer versions.

We're planning on upgrading this year to 8.6. I believe that in going to 8.6, we will be gaining some additional features. The newer versions will have better detection capabilities with improvement to their algorithms.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for about five years or six years.

The on-premises solution has high availability. The appliances that we've used are very stable. They just keep running. We have had very few issues with the appliances in terms of failure. In those situations, they were more on the hardware side. They just needed a reboot and that fixed things. Overall, the stability is good for on-premises. 

In terms of the cloud side, availability doesn't come into play as much because we don't change policies that often. We don't modify the policies on a day-to-day basis. We might modify a policy once a week or once every month, at the most. The client or endpoint really just needs to receive that update once, and it's pretty much good to go. So we're not relying too much on the cloud availability, except for that initial update for each endpoint. The cloud availability is going to be more relevant on the web side of the product, where you're going to want continual web access, filtering, et cetera.

One feature that I'm getting ready to take advantage of more is the ability to add more data crawlers to the DLP on-prem environment, without any extra Forcepoint costs or licensing needed for that additional data server. That will help in reducing the stress on the data server that we're using now. It will help manage all the policies, the clients that connect to it, and all of the network discovery tasks, especially. They will all be handled much more efficiently when we spread the load. We're looking to add an extra one or two Windows Servers for that, so the additional cost would just be related to the Windows setup.

Forcepoint's technical support for the solution is excellent. The technicians that I have dealt with have been with their company for a long time and they know their product inside and out.

There has been no other similar solution here, as long as I have been with the company. I started off with a sister company, and they actually used a very early version of Websense, which is what Forcepoint used to be called before it became Forcepoint. That means we have never used a competing vendor.

I was not involved in the initial deployment, but we've had it ever since I've been on the team here. I've been managing it ever since. I was there for the initial deployment in one of our sister companies. It wasn't anything unusually difficult. It just required installing some hardware and getting all the firewall rules worked out. Once you get all that in place, everything usually works pretty well. That's been my experience, even with upgrades. Most of the time our issues have been firewall blocks within our own company. That's usually the biggest hurdle, overcoming our firewall-related issues.

We use it on about 5,000 endpoints and we have two people who administer  it. They're both information security analysts.

I don't have ROI numbers. I base everything on: "Am I getting the support that I need?" And the answer is "yes."

We have never looked at other solutions at a PoC level.

What I can recommend is getting the highest tier of support that you can afford, because it's absolutely critical. I don't know how I would do everything if I had to submit a request and wait several days for it. I don't know how I would keep things going in that situation. With a higher level of support you can call someone and you also have someone who is managing your account. That's also really nice, because you get some extra benefits out of that.

I'm very satisfied and would rate it at nine out of 10.

It's for DLP and to monitor and make sure that no key files are being sent out of the organization. It also helps in terms of tracking any abnormal behavior.

We have about 700 users and it's endpoint-based. We add an agent to the endpoints and it coordinates with the server.

With Forcepoint we found that one employee who left had taken some files, and we were able to stop it. And if somebody is under a notice period, we now monitor whether any files are about to go out. When they take something with them, we can see that. We can also identify any abnormal behaviors that are happening. A lot of times it happens that if somebody is about to leave, they try to take some information away with them. We catch that fast.

It also helps in terms of HR stuff because file movement can indicate people who are looking for jobs. We can see CV movements and it helps as an indicator of a dissatisfied employee. We can at least see the behavior and see if we can do something about it.

Before Forcepoint, we had data in terms of how many terabytes go in and out, but now we can specifically see what goes where.

One of the most valuable features is being able to see file movement, where files are going. Every week we review the files. It can identify software codes, so we code files and we know where they're going and who's doing what. It gives us visibility. It shows any key files, any strange behaviors, such as if somebody is taking too many screenshots, and alerts us about that.

I would like to see improvement in the reporting. We can only get one week's worth of data; we can't get more than that. Also, the reporting console is very slow, making it very frustrating to use. There are times when I open it up on a Monday and take a download, but it takes so much time. You can get busy with other things and come back and it's still hanging and you can almost forget about it. 

Also, the server goes down and we have raised tickets to resolve that. In the past two weeks, we've had to deal with that two or three times. It's been a little annoying lately.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for one year.

The system is stable, but as I mentioned, the reporting portion is very unstable. If I want to get reports out, it takes a long time. Sometimes the server is down, and I have to raise tickets. I have had problems there.

The scalability is okay, there are no problems with that. We can add on more agents as we expand with more people. We haven't had any issues there.

I would rate customer service at 8.5 out of 10. When we have problems with the system, they respond and they generally resolve things within half a day.

This is our first solution of this kind.

The initial setup was straightforward but setting up the rules was very complex. It is something where things don't actually work as we think they will work. It generated a lot of false positives in the beginning.

Our deployment took about a month.

Our strategy was to start with auditing first. We haven't actually moved to blocking yet. When we tried to move to blocking critical files, it ended up blocking some other people at work. There are some issues around that and we have had to be careful.

We let it run on its own. I look at the data in Forcepoint on a weekly basis, but we don't have any administration of it, per se. My IT team handles the deployment of new employees coming in, meaning the deployment of the Forcepoint agent on their laptop. That's about it in terms of admin.

An integrator helped us, somebody who deals with Forcepoint products. There were no problems with that, although they were billing by time and the system is a little complex.

We have seen return on our investment because we're able to track our data. It's not so much an active return on investment, but more like an insurance policy. It prevents bad things from happening.

The pricing is reasonable. That's why we went with Forcepoint. They were pretty competitive.

There are no additional costs, other than the cost for additional licenses that we have to pay for ad hoc.

It's not as easy as Zscaler to connect. To be very honest, I think Zscaler has a better product with a better interface, but the cost of Forcepoint is more attractive. That's why we went for it. We looked at McAfee as well. McAfee is a bit resource-heavy. 

Zscaler was very good. The interface was really good and it's easy to set up. Forcepoint is okay. I spoke to some other customers who used Forcepoint and they said, "Look, the interface is a bit complex, but it has everything in place."

You need to put a lot of time and effort into Forcepoint, you need a dedicated team for it. You also need to have a data classification strategy firmly in place. You should classify your data before you get it. You also need to test your rules thoroughly before you implement them.

We have different areas of DLP like drive, chat, email, network, and endpoint protection. We have different data classifications which are regulated in our industry. Based on that data regulation, we created a few policies as per our government standards, like the social identity number, personally identifiable information, and personal health information. 

We categorized data for different sectors, and we have applied policies, and Forcepoint DLP actively filters it. If I'm sending some PII to you, it should get filtered out because it's against the organization's norm. It does its job actively.

I like that you can quickly create policies and enforce them in a matter of minutes. 

It would be better if we could easily integrate with other products. Suppose I want to integrate this DLP with some other CASB solutions or a firewall solution. In that case, it takes a considerable amount of time because Forcepoint DLP doesn't come with a legacy firewall or CASB solutions to integrate with it. We need to do it separately.

It's not improvised for different sectors, and I need to look for other solutions. I'm investing a lot of time researching and implementing other solutions for other areas. That is one point where I can't feel satisfied with this Forcepoint DLP.

The only problem we have faced is that it consumes most of the CPU whenever a Forcepoint DLP is deployed on an endpoint. This is when users feel some lag in their machine's performance or their Internet performance. That's when we uninstall and try to reinstall, or we'll give a cloud link to which it gets access. We use Forcepoint DLP for endpoint protection, not for email or cloud. For email and drive, we went with the Google DLP.

Forcepoint DLP isn't as efficient on drive or chat, or email. For that, we have some specialized solutions, but it would be better to have a single console where you can control all these areas. It would be pretty easy for a consumer who is going to use this product. All in one shot, you can try to track it and enforce your policies on a single dashboard. That is one point currently lacking in Forcepoint, and I feel they need to work on it.

In the next release, I would like to use this DLP across different solutions like network, firewall, email, or chat with a consolidated dashboard and with integration facilities with other solutions.

Security should work as a whole. It shouldn't work individually in blocks. It does not serve our purpose. It should be integrated with multiple solutions. For that, it should have enough intelligence to work with other tools.

I'm looking forward to seeing that kind of capability with Forcepoint.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for three years.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a stable solution.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a scalable solution. 

Technical support is pretty good. I don't see any kind of delay. As soon as we raise the request, we always get support from Forcepoint DLP immediately.

I heard that the implementation was pretty simple. Only the policy creation took time because we had to build use cases for it. Your industry might have a different use case, and my industry might have a different use case. It took a little bit of time, and it came from an implementation standpoint, and I felt it was pretty good. 

You just need one person working in shifts to use this solution. As we have 8,000 employees, we are doing it in shifts with three professionals.

We used an integrator to implement this solution.

We evaluated Google DLP and Netskope DLP. We chose Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention because of the ease of policy creation. For any DLP solution to work effectively, we need to create our use cases. On top of use cases, we need to build policies and enforce them. In Forcepoint DLP, it's pretty simple to create any kind of policy and enforce them. It doesn't take a lot of time to get it enforced. It all takes a matter of minutes, and I feel this is the biggest advantage of using this DLP solution.

If the organization is pretty small, then I can recommend this solution. However, if it's a pretty huge organization, I will step back a little bit because it won't serve its whole purpose.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention a six.

Forcepoint DLP is a part of a data protection program. A customer will rely on a main DLP and use a complementary tool, in addition to the DLP, such as a data classification solution like Boldon James or Microsoft Information Protection. They will also complement the solution with a rights management solution like Microsoft Rights Management. Forcepoint is part of a big portfolio for data protection.

We deploy the solution at customer sites. Most of our customers are in two sectors, financial and telecom. All of our deployments are on-prem.

Among the most valuable features are the

• network DLP, which has two components 
• DLP agent installed on endpoints
• discovery, as it covers the endpoints and shared folders on servers. 

These features are important for control. A main part of DLP is its use as a tool that provides different layers of controls.

The Forcepoint tool is well developed. It is ranked in many evaluations at the top when it comes to enterprise DLP solutions. It has good artificial intelligence that enables our customers to focus on specific incidents, instead of having a complicated list of uncategorized incidents.

There is room for improvement regarding OCR. I would like to see it enhanced to handle multiple languages and it should be easier to manage.

There are also options that could be handled smartly in the tool, like the way a web data source is handled. It would be good if any downloaded document could have the same policy.

I've been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for three years. We are not regular users, we are admin. We provide the solution for our customers.

The stability is good. Issues are generally related to the agent. Whenever the agent is stable, the solution is stable. Whenever there are issues, it is common for them to be connected to the agent, making the solution unstable. Based on our experience, the stability has not been very good, but it has also not been bad.

We have implemented the solution on anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 endpoints.

We get good feedback regarding the support. They respond well and provide support whenever required. They are aware of their product in a professional way. And whenever we escalate to the highest level, we get to a suitable person who can provide us with what we require.

One thing that could be improved is that escalation could be done faster.

Neutral

I have seen Forcepoint replace Symantec or McAfee in some cases. I haven't seen any cases where a client wants to replace Forcepoint.

A mandatory process that should be done before implementing the tool is a data classification analysis and the setting of a policy for data classification. These processes are done through an analysis session with different departments. The session includes teaching them about data classification policies and getting information from them regarding the data that needs to be protected and the recommended classification level that data should have.

We then deploy the server-side in the data center and start installing a sample agent. We test this agent and we test sample policies to ensure everything is okay on the sample agent. Finally, we do a full deployment.

Maintenance, post-deployment, involves making sure the solution is updated to the latest version. It has different components, and each component should be updated to the appropriate version. The same goes for the agents on the computers. The configuration should be reviewed and maintained over time, as well. One person is enough to maintain a Forcepoint instance.

As a partner, we have seen ROI with Forcepoint. We cover our costs through licenses, implementation services, and SLAs in which we support our customers and help resolve their issues whenever they want to open cases or adjust configuration.

They are flexible regarding the pricing and they have a good model for an OEM data classification tool. This makes for good pricing. Forcepoint has been one of the most competitively priced products over the last few years.

Overall, Forcepoint has good strategy and development. It is stable and has not changed as a company for a long time. It is focused on a specific solution and that makes for a good portfolio.

We use Forcepoint for compliance, PCI DSS, and data protection at the network, endpoint, and data discovery levels.

Forcepoint has out-of-the-box rules and policies for PCI DSS and GDPR compliance. The compliance features are easy to deploy and implement. If your data is not classified, you need to do that first, but the functionality is out-of-the-box otherwise. 

Forcepoint offers many policies that conform to global DLP best practices, including requirements specific to regions like the Middle East, Europe, etc. They have a policy database in their product. That feature is unique to Forcepoint. Their AI and fingerprinting are incredibly effective and robust. We have tested it multiple times. It always catches the correct data being leaked.

They can improve a bit in the OCR category. The OCR deployment could be simplified. Right now, you have to set up a separate server to manage all the data going through the network, especially the images. Forcepoint could better integrate the OCR component with central management. 

Many customers ask how we will detect data in the OCR images. We must tell them that we'll deploy another machine to manage OCR. However, smaller enterprises have limited hardware. An enterprise can provide the necessary hardware but not the SMEs. This is a critical category because data can be leaked through images. 

I would also like Forcepoint to add support for AIX machines and databases. The solution still doesn't support certain machines like IBM AIX machines. Forcepoint typically supports QRadar integration, so maybe they can increase the work support on the server side.

We have been using Forcepoint DLP for three years.

Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention is a stable product. We have had any serious issues on the client side. 

Forcepoint supports huge deployments of more than 20,000 endpoints. You can scale up from hundreds to thousands. It's easy to scale by adding devices and increasing the hardware to support more systems in the same architecture or the same infrastructure. It covers everything, from clouds to networks and endpoints, Linux servers, Mac laptops, etc.

I rate Forcepoint support eight out of 10. Their support is good, but not excellent. At the same time, their presales service is strong. Overall, their standard support is not bad. They try to resolve problems in time and usually ask relevant questions. They are knowledgeable, but you'll need to pay for a higher tier if you want faster response times and 24/7 support.  

Positive

I rate Forcepoint 10 out of 10 for ease of setup. It's one of the simplest DLP solutions I've used. Symantec is more difficult than Forcepoint. Setting up Forcepoint is straightforward. 

They have an extensive knowledge base online, and the steps are well-defined in those documents. We have a console server called Forcepoint Management Center. We also need to deploy DLP agents a Protective Appliance on the network server. Forcepoint has extensive support for integrating with other vendors, so the setup is quite fast. We can integrate the product with any of the proxies available in the customer environment.

I rate Forcepoint eight out of 10 for pricing. We have a different team that handles the pricing, quotes, and presales. I'm on the technical side, so I'm not sure about the cost.  Our customers tell us they prefer Forcepoint because of their market presence. It's also the leader on Gartner's Magic Quadrant and has high ratings on third-party platforms. They prefer Forcepoint. I don't believe the price is too high, but Forcepoint is a premium service and the cost is consistent with the product they are providing.

I'm referring to the price from a vendor perspective. When a customer asks us to provide this product to meet their budget, Forcepoint will cooperate with us and provide discounts. 

I rate Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention 10 out of 10. It's the best product on the market. When our customers compare it with Symantec, McAfee, or Trend Micro, the response is extremely positive. The product is stable and scalable, and the licensing tiers are fairly simple. It's easy for us to explain to customers which features are available for each pricing tier. 

I primarily use the solution for endpoint network and cloud application channels.

From the coverage perspective, it has better insights. 

The solution is stable.

It can scale. 

Technical support has been helpful. 

The pricing is fine. 

It can be giving better insights. 

The footprint could be lower. We'd like fewer devices and components. We'd like to have something unified. Maybe they could reduce the number of servers or hardware that need to be implemented as part of the solution. 

The setup could be streamlined. 

Feature requests do take some time to implement. 

I'd like to have fewer workflows on-prem. Still, I'd like to ensure I get endpoint protection.

Managing the resources and managing the hardware requires multiple people. I have to rely on my server and network administrators, and I have to rely on the DLP administrator, who is managing the solution. That's too many resources, I have to look into it. I want to have a SaaS-based solution to reduce my cost and administration effort in terms of server management, et cetera.

I've used the solution for more than three years. 

It is stable. My only requirement is to be able to invest further or maintain the hardware.

I haven't faced any scalability issues thus far. 

I have 5,000 users on the solution in my organization. We use it regularly. We started with just 3,000 users and have since scaled up. I'm not sure if we will scale more. 

Technical support is fine. I didn't face many challenges yet. However, I have made requests for some of the features and some time requirements. Some of them have to be gone to their development team to add such features, and I do have a couple of enhancements that were done with the latest updates. That said, usually, feature requests maybe take some time. They have their own priorities to address. In general, however, support-wise, I'm good.

Positive

I'm also aware of Symantec and McAfee. 

Forcepoint has extensive coverage compared to Symantec or McAfee. The reliability was good. I'm getting better coverage in terms of security, and I get better insights as well.

Symantec also seems to be good. That's my understanding of the market. However, due to their recent acquisition via Broadcom, they have some higher renewal costs. 

Forcepoint, from a coverage perspective, it is giving better insights on the content. We cannot compare the insights with Microsoft, Palo Alto, or even Trend Micro.

In terms of the initial setup, they have bifurcated in a way so that each and every channel has to be protected. I don't understand why can't we enable something on the fly. For example, with a checkbox, I should be able to enable it as part of the feature to enable the future. That is not available, so I have to go ahead and deploy different components on different channels.

However, it is rather easy. I'd rate it a four out of five in terms of ease of setup.

Skill-wise and license-wise there is no major challenge. 

The value you get with this solution in terms of price is good. Other options don't give the same coverage. 

I'm just looking for a SaaS-based model. That's what I am exploring right now.

Fortunately or unfortunately, Forcepoint has not come up with a pure SaaS-based DLP. I'm just looking in the market to see what the best solution I can get is in terms of the same sort of production or to see how I can gradually migrate it or have a one-time migration of my Forcepoint policies directly to the SaaS-based solution. I'm hoping I can reduce my administration efforts in terms of managing the hardware.

I'm an end-user. 

I use a combination of on-premises and cloud deployments. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.