Clearswift: Protecting Critical Information while ProvidingCompliance

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its global reach has enunciated the need to enhance the 'protection' of critical information,” says Dr. Guy Bunker, SVP, Clearswift. The company helps global organisations to comply with GDPR in an unprecedented level of real-time data visibility, intelligent policy enforcement and adaptive security. Founded in 1982, Clearswift’s headquarter is based in the United Kingdom, with regional offices and resellers across the globe. The company works to increase data security and cyber protection for its global customer base in more than 70 countries.

Providing solutions for organisations to become GDPR compliant, the team at Clearswift offers technology that guides companies from the data discovery phase, to securing data and preventing attacks, and the final stage of maintaining compliance. In the discovery phase, Clearswift offers solutions such as — Critical Information Protection (CIP) for the endpoint, SECURE Email Gateway/Argon for Email, and SECURE Web Gateway or SECURE ICAP Gateway solutions. “All these solutions can be used as part of a compliance project, discovering data, securing data, and governing data,” adds Bunker.

Clearswift leverages top-notch technologies to deliver solutions that can be used to handle and secure critical information. Laying emphasis on GDPR Compliance, Clearswift provides user-friendly solutions for small, medium, and large enterprises to help them become GDPR Compliant. Adding to this, Bunker says, “We are currently working with a number of our channel partners on initiatives where we can join up with other technology vendors to offer a holistic solution for GDPR compliance.” GDPR Compliance ultimately involves a mix of people, process, and technology. “GDPR is about protecting information and preventing it from falling into unauthorized hands.

That can occur through a cyber-criminal stealing it, a malicious insider misappropriating it – or as more often the case is, a team member makes a mistake and sends the wrong information to the wrong person or publishes sensitive data inadvertently,” explains Bunker.

Traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions purely detect and block inappropriate communication, but Clearswift’s DLP solution has changed the game. Its unique Adaptive Redaction technology augments content as it flows across the organisations boundary, removing only that information which breaks policy while leaving the rest alone. In addition, Clearswift also delivers solutions that are in conformity with Cloud services, “Those who are using cloud based applications and need security and compliance around them; we can protect Office 365 by providing the comprehensive security needed to help with compliance,” elaborates Bunker. Clearswift offers transparent security and can protect the customer on-premise or move them to a cloud based solution.

Explaining one of the challenges faced by a client, Bunker said that in this particular case, the client’s company was not supposed to receive credit card details but due to some issue with their processes, they were receiving them. Before the solutions were deployed by Clearswift, receiving the email with the details resulted in the audit or compliance department visiting and cleaning up – a costly and time consuming process. The team at Clearswift helped its client by automatically removing the credit card details from email and attached documents before it arrived on the internal network. As the rest of the email, or a version of the document was delivered with the sensitive information removed, security was achieved without interfering with the communication flow. This enabled compliance as well as reducing the operational costs.

Clearswift’s technology roadmap includes the development of solutions to keep up with the evolving cyber security and compliance landscape. “Looking further at the future, we see behavioral analysis becoming mainstream, with integrated solutions that can detect behavior which is likely to result in a compliance breach being integrated into both deep content and packet inspection solutions,” concludes Bunker.