What Happened to the Gartner DLP Magic Quadrant?

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant (MQ) is an institution. Every year, the IT consulting firm publishes a series of these market research documents outlining a market’s direction, maturity, and the participants within different market segments. Vendors anxiously await its publication as it provides them with an independent evaluation. Customers use it as a guideline when making strategic purchasing decisions.

But in 2018, one regular MQ was missing: The Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Data Loss Prevention (DLP). What happened to it?

The short explanation is this: Gartner sent the DLP MQ into retirement. As of 2018, the enterprise data loss prevention market is being covered by a Market Guide instead.

The longer version goes as follows: The enterprise DLP market has matured to the point where Gartner only observed minor movements of the companies represented in the 2x2 matrix that ranks market participants based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. Acquisitions that consolidated the market, as well as market exits, left the MQ static.

Gartner has observed a shift in market requirements in favor of integrated SASE-based data protection that combines inline DLP, CASB, and out-of-band CASB, along with best-in-class threat protection. 

Enterprise DLP solutions are notorious for being overly complex and costly. Organizations that purchase enterprise DLP often end up using only a small subset of its capabilities and address only basic use cases that could be solved with an integrated DLP solution, thus sparing the organization from costly and time-intensive setup and integration.

According to Gartner estimates, “By 2021, 90% of organizations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, an increase from 50% today,"¹ and that those products will be responsible for the great majority of DLP market revenue the year after, as opposed to enterprise DLP.²

However, this doesn’t mean enterprise and integrated DLP are mutually exclusive. Organizations with strong requirements for unified workflows across all channels should still deploy enterprise DLP. And those that have already made investments into such products should work with their existing infrastructure. Nevertheless, any organization should consider adding integrated DLP to address further use cases that close the gaps in their existing data protection strategy.

For example, an organization that uses the Zscaler platform to replace a traditional secure web gateway and has deployed DLP from Symantec or Forcepoint on the endpoint can easily add Zscaler Cloud DLP for data-in-motion inspection. This will provide visibility into encrypted traffic and protect roaming users with elastically scalable inline inspection—without capacity restraints or performance degradation.

If you would like to learn more about the integrated Zscaler Cloud DLP solution and how it can help you close the gaps in your data protection strategy, check out our ebook or learn about our integrated data protection platform or CASB and DLP solutions.

1. How to Choose Between Enterprise DLP and Integrated DLP Approaches