Data-centric protections need to address data discovery and classification, incident workflow, policy creation/management and data movement detection. The breadth of technology required to accomplish all of this is broad, covering:

• Fully-integrated encryption for end points for data in use, in motion and at rest within applications (e-mail, file servers, etc.), including sensitive data transferred onto portable storage devices
• Host-based DLP for localized detection and prevention of data leakage for data in use, data in motion, and data at rest
• Network DLP with data discovery and analysis, network monitoring (with extensive protocol and application parsing support), and prevention capabilities for both inbound and outbound content

How should a management team go about evaluating today’s encryption and emerging data leakage prevention (DLP) tools? What questions should they ask of the vendor provider(s)? How does a management team determine which solution being proposed will meet the most requirements for today--and in the future? How do they even set requirements without due diligence and discovery technologies to assist in locating and classifying what it is they need to protect? How do they weigh specific business requirements to product features? How do they gauge the stability of the vendor? How do they compare pricing models (per user, per server) and such additional factors as growth potential and integration with other vendor products to optimize their investments?

Organizations need a way to map business needs against all these challenges in procuring a technical solution. To help, SANS has developed the following Prospective Vendor Checklist. In it, requirements have been organized into broad categories to include:

• Host/network data leakage protection and encryption (how the product functions)
• Management and support (how the product can be managed)
• Company profile and pricing (how viable the vendor is, what services it offers, and product pricing)

This checklist can be sent to prospective vendors, and can be used in combination with our interactive Data Protection Requirements Worksheets to calculate ratings and compare vendors.