Digital Risk Protection Market Sees Significant Evolution in Recent Years

“Digital Risk Protection” has gotten a makeover since Forrester’s last “Digital Risk Monitoring” Wave in Q3 2016. As a refresher, Digital Risk Protection is the process of finding and eliminating malicious or damaging activity on social media and other external digital channels that directly impact business, brand and people.

The obvious change is in the name: monitoring has become protection. This is a conscious choice that reflects an increased importance on remediation over simple detection. Finding threats is only helpful if the Digital Risk Protection solution can help the business remediate the content or otherwise eliminate the risk associated with the issue.

This change is one of many important evolutions in the market, as spelled out in Forrester’s recently published Forrester New Wave: Digital Risk Protection, Q3 2018 report, which assesses 14 DRP vendors on a variety of criteria and likewise tries to answer the question, what is Digital Risk Protection? The report defines the space and outlines how organizations can monitor their digital risk and protect themselves.

The Forrester Wave: Digital Risk Protection, Q3 2018, named ZeroFox a Leader after a thorough evaluation of the 14 top vendors. In its assessment of Digital Risk Protection vendors, Forrester stated, “ZeroFox is best for those that want actionable intelligence and rapid remediation. Customers praise ZeroFox for its platform’s flexibility and ease of use, the ability to take immediate remediation action and its brand risk analytics.”² Forrester’s research assessed vendors on a variety of criteria that rank capabilities across multiple categories, with a rating of “Differentiated” being the highest. ZeroFox received the “Differentiated” rating within the “Current Offering” and “Strategy” categories including:

• Social & mobile risk protection;
• Digital risk analysis & review;
• Dashboard and UI;
• DRP breadth and depth;
• Vision & execution;
• Global reach and analysts;
• Thought leadership and strategic partnerships.

Nick Hayes, author of the report, first outlines the criteria that make up a DRP solution’s ability to deal with digital risk, including:

• Functionality to collect and scan data from a broad set of digital channels
• Capabilities to map, monitor, and mitigate digital risks
• A clear focus on security use cases and functions
• Demonstrated success and market relevance

Digital risks can be found anywhere online, and include threats found on social media, mobile platforms and surface and deep/dark web. Social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube provide a wealth of opportunity for connection and promotion, but also run the risk of malicious actors taking to these networks to impersonate your brand and your executives, as well as scam and profit off your customer base.

Outside of social media, web-based digital risks on forums, blogs, search engines, domain registrars and the deep, unindexed web offer additional challenges. From coupon scams to counterfeit goods, bad actors use these platforms all too often for malicious activity. Increasingly, organizations are turning to Digital Risk Protection solutions for brand security, VIP protection and digital footprint mapping

Organizations noted that “social media intelligence and dark web reconnaissance” are in high demand, as is the need to collect and correlate data for a broad range of uses cases and intelligence purposes. Most important to those interviewed were “social media intelligence and cyber intelligence,” two areas where ZeroFox is uniquely focused. “DRP customers most frequently cited these two intelligence domains as “extremely important” factors in their DRP selection decisions (44% and 38%, respectively).”

We believe our company’s category-leading platform combined with our best-in-market strategic vision, sets us up to best serve our customers over the long term. Our current product offering is not only a leader in the space, it continues to substantially evolve as our team continues to execute on our innovative best-in-breed strategy.

Still have questions? What does Digital Risk Protection mean to ZeroFox in particular? How do we help organizations address the myriads of risks? Check out the ZeroFox Platform, or get your complimentary copy of the Forrester Digital Risk Protection New Wave.