Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention Reviews

Forcepoint is installed on our company-issued laptops to act as an on-premises firewall. This ensures that we cannot access websites that are not whitelisted in the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) system, even when working from home.

The most valuable feature is security.

The administration should take a proactive approach to ensure that research-related websites can be accessed without having to be whitelisted, even if there are some sites that remain off-limits.

The setup is complex and has room for improvement.

The support is slow and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is as stable as our internet connection.

I give the scalability a nine out of ten.

We have 3,000 employees using the solution.

We use third-party technical support. The turnaround time for support is slow.

I believe the initial setup is complex and is handled by another team.

The deployment was done over the weekends and it took the IT team approximately two to three months to deploy bank-wide.

The licensing is on an annual basis.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution requires around 15 people for deployment and maintenance.

I recommend the solution to others.

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.

The main purpose of DLP is to protect data from being sent outside of the organization without authorization. So, my client uses it to protect emails and web traffic and to integrate with content classification and USB blocking systems.

Some good features are basically its UAV Analytics engine. And even fingerprinting is really good in Forcepoint.

Forcepoint recently released an in-line proxy feature, which is a great addition. Previously, users had to add an extension to their browsers, but now that's not necessary. Now, that extension is not needed. 

One area that could be improved is the support. The current support is not very good. Because they don't come on time when a customer really needs it, they take a lot of time to troubleshoot anything.

For Mac, they should introduce the feature of airdrop. Currently, no DLP detects the airdrop feature. Like, if we have an airdrop. So, no DLP detects that any file is going from Airdrop. Our customers have these use cases. 

I have been working with this solution for five years. For Forcepoint, we are a titanium partner. 

It's scalable. We sell to medium and enterprise-level businesses. 

It is an easy installation for Forcepoint.

To deploy Forcepoint, we would take almost a week because it's an on-prem solution. But now they have even a cloud platform. So it can be done in one or two days. It depends on the customer and how they provide the insight and everything.

One person is enough for the deployment and installation process. 

For Endpoint DLP, obviously, we are the people who do maintenance. But for SaaS-based, it is GTP service only.

The pricing is fine. It's a yearly based license. For endpoint Forcepoint DLP, they have another license, and for network DLP, they have another license.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It is a really good product. 

It is very user-friendly, even for admins. However, the support is very low otherwise the product is very good. 

The primary use for the product is to protect our intellectual property. Additionally, I use the product for compliance and regulatory purposes, which means ensuring that certain data is protected in accordance with regulations and standard policies. 

I have seen benefits, particularly in terms of increased confidence in compliance with data protection regulations. When it comes to external auditors, I am confident that they won't find any issues related to data protection. Additionally, it has increased my confidence that our organization's intellectual property is not misused or extracted without permission.

I like the product's integration at the network layer, which allows for integration with other vendors' security solutions as long as they are compatible with ICAP integration. For example, integrating DLP with web security or email security solutions. This flexibility is a valuable feature for me as it allows for more efficient use of the product, without necessarily requiring the use of all of Forcepoint's products.

I would like to see the product extended into the cloud as a single solution. It currently requires another product, the Cloud Access Security Brokers, to protect both on-premise and cloud data. I hope it can be consolidated into a single suite, offering protection for both On-Premise and cloud data, users on and off the corporate network, and users using corporate devices and BYOD. It would make the whole DLP process much more linear and efficient. I agree that moving to the cloud is the future and the present, and many people who use DLP have already made a move to the cloud.

I have been using Forcepoint Data Loss Prevention for six years, and I am currently using the latest version, which is 10.0. 

I have used over eight versions in the past and kept up with the updates as they were released.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability of Forcepoint DLP as a nine out of ten. It has a supplemental server feature that allows for easy scaling. As the number of users and data traffic increases, all that is needed is to add an additional supplemental server, which is not complex and only requires a Windows machine with minimal specifications.

Let's say you have 10,000 users and one management console or server with two supplemental servers. Your management server stays the same as your user base grows to 20,000. You don't need to increase your management server. All you need to do is add supplemental servers, and you're ready to handle the increased user base and traffic.

Implementing Forcepoint DLP can be a bit complex, as it requires a DLP expert to help with the setup. However, day-to-day administration is quite user-friendly. We are currently using the on-Prem version of Forcepoint DLP as no cloud version is available yet.

We are Forcepoint partners. So as much as we sell the products, we have the technical skill sets to implement the solution.

The term "expensive" is relative. If the ROI is good, no matter the amount of money invested, it is a win-win. If the cost meets the demands or it meets what you set out to do, what you set out to achieve. Holistically, it's not the most expensive compared to its competitors.

Forcepoint is being fully transparent with its costs. There are no hidden costs or extra costs.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

If you are considering using Forcepoint DLP, it is miles ahead of its competitors in the realm of DLP. Forcepoint stands out as the clear leader when we compare pure DLP solutions. The closest competitor would be Symantec, but even they are miles behind in terms of capabilities. So, if you're looking for a top-performing DLP solution, Forcepoint is the way to go.

The solution is easy to manage. 

I am not able to get support directly from Forcepoint. 

I have been working with the product for three years. 

I rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. 

I rate Forcepoint DLP's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 11,000 users. 

The tool's support does not provide urgent solutions when we face issues. 

Neutral

We have five resources to handle Forcepoint DLP's maintenance. 

I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten. 

I rate Forcepoint DLP a seven out of ten. 

I deployed the solution for three of our customers, and the primary use case is data loss prevention.

The feature with which the solution integrates with the proxy, the ICAP protocol that logs the inline traffic or real-time traffic, is valuable.

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality is another helpful feature, especially for unstructured data. Being able to discover sensitive data in an unstructured format is the most beneficial element of the solution.

We can add tags to table format or Excel documents, such as ''confidential'' or ''sensitive information'', and the DLP suite takes action according to the defined policy for each tag.

The APIs for device integration are limited, so that could be improved.

If a feature known as Exact Data Match is present, I cannot detect it. This is an easily accessible feature in the Symantec DLP product and those from other vendors, such as Zscaler. EDM either needs to be added as a feature or made easier to find, as I couldn't find it. It's possible none of my customers got a license for this particular feature, but that seems unlikely.

Forcepoint is very stable; I rate it a nine out of ten for stability. 

The solution has excellent scalability; I rate it eight out of ten here. 

The customer support is outstanding. 

Positive

The deployment is straightforward once you understand the solution's architecture. A proper understanding of the different components of Forcepoint DLP is essential, as deploying an enterprise-level DLP could be confusing because the policy server is separate from the main engine sitting on the Triton server. Understanding the components of the enterprise DLP suite is the most critical element for a successful deployment. Still, I rate the solution seven out of ten in terms of ease of setup.

The scale of the particular DLP deployment is also a factor; we had cases where the customer only required endpoint or network DLP, a relatively quick job that two staff can complete. A complete DLP suite, including email, web, and network DLP, plus data classification and labelling, would require four associates. Our most recent deployment was a complete enterprise DLP, which required four staff. The entire deployment took almost three months, including a one-month planning phase. During the planning phase, we prepared the documentation, designed the HLDs and LLDs, and high and low-level diagrams. Following acceptance from the customer, we started the implementation, which took roughly 50 to 60 days.

The level of maintenance required depends on how many events per hour a particular tool is putting out. If a customer wants to check analytics or identify an email or data leak, that situation doesn't require much policy fine-tuning, and a single staff member could deal with it. The customer can also decide what coverage they want, which may be 24/7, an admin to monitor events only, or Monday-to-Friday support. The coverage determines how many engineers will be required.

Another factor in maintenance requirements is the volume of events, as an extensive client could have more than 10,000 servers with many sensitive data in motion. The customer had 24,000 users for our last deployment, and there wasn't a dedicated team for the DLP. The engineering team took care of the network, endpoint, and data security together. There were ten of us on the team, with two engineers per shift for 24/7 coverage.

I can't comment on the cost, as a different department handles that.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

Forcepoint is the best DLP solution in the industry. I have yet to see another DLP solution on the market that provides as much security for endpoints; their endpoint DLP is unbeatable. Forcepoint also has an enormous number of features. It's handy, lightweight, easy to deploy, captures all the details, and never gives false positives; it's an excellent product.

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 use the solution for processing our sensitive data which is strategic data and strategic information exchanged between our top management personnel. 

The purpose was to acquire the solution to protect us from incidents involving the sensitive data from our group getting taken. This happened previously, where data was taken from us and given to another competitor. There was another leak as well and since then we've tried to carefully guard our data and implemented, for example, Apple Mail to protect our mail from third parties.

The product is interesting. It meets our needs very well. It's the best solution when compared to Symantec, for example. We have both ForcePoint and Gartner as well and it's a leader among similar solutions.

The solution offers very good sensitive data protection.

The solution is excellent at protecting strategic information. I deployed it when I was working in the petrol industry for an oil and gas group. It was the biggest one in Morocco. We held important information about critical activities, including providing gas and oxygen for the hospital. We were considered critical IT and we had to comply with the operative elective and the law. DLP helped us to protect our data and we improved our safety in order to comply with the law and existing regulations.

It would be wonderful if the solution could develop more AI and machine learning capabilities. It would also be good if the solution was able to integrate with other ML and AI solutions. Right now, this is lacking.

We started working with Forcepoint DLP three years ago. 

The solution is stable enough.

The solution easily scales. We are able to expand it as needed.

Technical support was good. 

The is the first type of solution in this category that we have used.

In terms of implementing the solution, it's not easy and not complex. It's average. The deployment's level of difficulty is average as well. You just need to have the prerequisites satisfied. 

I appreciate their support because their support was with us to assist us until we deployed the two instances in our infrastructure.

I was the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer of the company, at the time. My scope was to assist and to manage the project from the start to the close. I worked with the operational security to deploy it.

My scope was to cover governance. For example, elaborating on the policy for classification. It was a prerequisite to define the policy target in the DLP and to organize or to plan for the workshop with the strategic and sensitive entities in our group. I made sure they tried the solution and integrated the entities into the pilot side as well. 

The solution's support assisted us throughout the deployment process.

We were on Office 365 on the cloud. It wasn't enough. Since then, we've described our policy to Apple Mail and have elaborated out information classification. Afterward, we invited the business and the strategic entity to workshops to classify the data effectively and try the solution after implementing the DLP.

We use a hybrid deployment model and acquired the solution with the hybrid functionality to help protect our sensitive data in the inter-managed hybrid space.

The solution has been good, and it has responded to our needs. As a group, we were afraid of the safety around our sensitive data which was exchanged in our mail. We had an obligation to protect the data classified as confidential or restricted. The solution, since implementation, has helped us to protect our data and mitigate risk effectively.

ForcePoint also offers a bundle that includes modules that cover URL filtering and app data for other DLPs. It's very good.

Based on my experience, I advise any other organizations to test, try, and to be convinced by the solution before fully implementing it. Users will need to define exactly what it is they need from it and what their exact needs are to effectively deploy it. I think every user will appreciate that solution. 

We've experienced a lot of cyberattacks, so the DLP is necessary for us and would be beneficial to any company that has critical activities or has staff that exchanges sensitive data.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.