Case Study: DTEX Provides Visibility and Context to Global Materials Company

A global materials science company that invests heavily in research and holds thousands of patents worldwide realized it needed a modern and scalable solution to protect against malicious insiders, competitors and other hostile actors.

The company was using a mix of legacy and cloud-based technologies, including DLP, but was still struggling to gain the behavioral insights they needed to address insider risk and protect intellectual property (IP).

The Challenge

The company recognized that it lacked visibility to how its employees accessed, modified and used their IP. Without visibility, protection was impossible.

The company also required a solution that could scale rapidly. With offices around the world a large remote workforce often operating from home networks, the company was struggling to support heavy endpoint agents, and collection and transmission of unnecessary data. Their existing DLP solution was slowing them down and hindering scaling.

Finally, the organization recognized that their innovative culture and expansive patent portfolio was a product of employee engagement and trust.

The solution would need to maintain this employee engagement and trust. Intrusive employee surveillance solutions that relied on keystroke logging, screen capture, and similar techniques would not be acceptable.

The Solution

The company engaged DTEX for a proof of concept. The DTEX InTERCEPT platform deployed quickly across Windows, MacOS, and Linux endpoints, and immediately provided insight to employee data use without requiring extensive configuration. Even older endpoints continued to perform well.

Rather than relying on recording detailed events and eroding employee trust, DTEX InTERCEPT collected no more than 3-4MB of data per user per day, without impacting employee productivity or network or endpoint performance, using less than 0.5% CPU. DTEX also enhanced security without invading employee privacy; its ‘privacy-by-design’ approach minimises excess and unnecessary data collection, and uses pseudonymization to mask data elements on individual employees by default including username, email, IP address, domain name and device name.

The Result

DTEX InTERCEPT provided the company with the contextual data they needed – and that was missing from their existing tech stack – to be able to detect, deter and defend against unsanctioned data use and movement.

The InTERCEPT platform unified the capabilities of insider threat management, user and entity behavior analytics, digital forensics, and endpoint DLP in an all-in-one lightweight, cloud-native solution.

Using the behavior context and activity intelligence provided by InTERCEPT, the company can now answer the Who, WHAT, When, Where, Why and How to defend against insider threats and data loss events – all without invading employee privacy.

Contact us to learn more about how DTEX provides contextual insights to proactively defend against insider risk.