High Speed Discovery with Symantec DLP 16

This continues our blog series on Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) 16 where we have been discussing a number of new features and capabilities. We are excited to showcase High Speed Discovery for File Systems, a feature that can enable organizations to scan more and more data in their on-prem network shares in a shorter time span. It enables organizations to achieve high scan throughputs of up to 1TB/hour while scanning on-prem file/network shares.

Real World Data Discovery Challenges

Today organizations deal with a lot of data. There are terabytes or even petabytes of data that have been lying in organizations for decades and new data are being added every second. Scanning such huge volumes of data has been both time consuming and resource intensive.

One of the common use cases that we hear from our customers is for Audit purposes. Organizations need to scan all their data on a regular basis to ensure audit compliance. However, achieving this is challenging because of the current scan speeds, petabytes of data, and the dynamic nature of new data growth. This complexity adds to the difficulty to accurately identify and scan all this data in time for audit.

To add further to the challenge, new compliance regulations are introduced frequently across the globe or to specific industries, which makes it imperative for organizations to ensure compliance at regular intervals, because the cost of not doing so is extremely high. Again, the current scanning speeds make it very difficult to scan such high volume data sets in a timely manner.

We are also seeing many of our customers move their data to the cloud. However, this is not always straightforward as some want to scan and identify data that is critical to them and retain that data on-premises. For example, consider a large enterprise that has decades of data, managing and orchestrating the data discovery process can feel never ending as the process is both highly time and resource intensive.

At Symantec, by Broadcom Software, we are committed to providing solutions to the hardest problems in data protection. High Speed Discovery is one of these solutions. 

How does High Speed Discovery help?

In DLP 16, we provide a solution to these problems by introducing a newly re-architected Discovery solution to scan File systems i.e. File System High Speed Discovery.  This enables organizations to scan more and more data quickly, ensuring data compliance and achieving high scan throughputs of 1 TB/hour or more depending on the environment.

Customers that participated in the DLP 16 beta test program expressed excitement about this feature making it one of the most anticipated features they were looking forward to. It not only offers industry leading performance but also optimum utilization of their resources.

File System High Speed Discovery overcomes many of the limitations that are currently faced with on-prem file system scanning. Some of the major benefits include -

• The new architecture not only supports larger clustering of servers but also the performance increases linearly as the scale increases
• These servers that are clustered together work independently and simultaneously to scan a larger file share. As there is no dependency on each other or any other server, performance can be optimized based on external environmental factors
• Scans are simpler to administer as a single target can be used to represent a large share or shares from multiple file servers
• The same set of servers can be assigned to multiple shares to scan at the same time.

The DLP File System High Speed Discovery solution offers one of the highest speeds to scan on-prem data in the market and is one of our key differentiating features. As many organizations are and will continue to work in a hybrid mode in their cloud journey, this new solution will elevate their experience to discover and protect data in their on-prem environment.

To summarize, as organizations scale their High Speed Discovery server setup they will observe higher scan throughput of up to (but not limited to) 1 TB/hour depending on certain factors like network I/O speeds, files being scanned, DLP policies, etc.

What Next?

We understand that the need to discover more and more sensitive data at a high speed goes beyond network and file shares. And we are committed to offering solutions that would make data discovery easier, faster and more convenient. File System High Speed Discovery is the first step in that direction. Symantec will continue to invest to achieve this goal and to discover and protect more and more data.

Read more about High Speed Discovery here.