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Digital Guardian (DG) is a pioneer in the area of intellectual property (IP) protection. The company was founded in 2003 as Verdasys in an effort to prevent privileged insiders from stealing corporate IP. The resulting product is a kernel-level endpoint agent that can monitor all system and user activity and interaction with data.
In addition to activity that violates policy, the solution also logs seemingly benign user activity. After establishing benchmarks of this "normal" user behavior, the solution is then capable of identifying suspicious activity that is outside the norm. Because the solution is tracking all activity, an administrator can also review user activity – often step by painful step – to establish user intent. This same capability is also facilitating DG's recent push into the Endpoint Detection and Response space for protection against advanced threats.
All endpoint activity is logged as contextual events (separate from policy violations or incidents), including file activity, application use and data touches, along with an extensive list of other activity. The logging of these contextual elements is unique to DG and can be leveraged to detect activity that traditional DLP solutions do not even attempt.
DG also utilizes automated file tagging to classify files. These tags are permanent and persistent, meaning that the tags follow files through any iteration, including copy/paste to new file, file archiving and even password protecting. This enables the DLP solution to identify files even if the solution cannot open the file for sensitive data detection.
In 2015, DG acquired Code Green Networks to round out their ADLP offering with traditional DLP components. Currently the DG ADLP and TDLP solutions are sold separately and the integration between the two is limited to a common incident log. TDLP (Network and Discovery) system configuration, policy creation/management, reporting and incident workflow is still managed in its own interface.