As I mentioned previously, I’m working on an update to Understanding and Selecting a DLP Solution. While much of the paper still stands, one area I’m adding a bunch of content to is the selection process. I decided to buff it up with more details, and also put together a selection worksheet to help people figure out their requirements. This isn’t an RFP, but a checklist to help you figure out major requirements – which you will use to build your RFP – and manage the selection process.

The first step, and this post, are fairly short and simple:

Define the Selection Team

Identify business units that need to be involved and create a selection committee. We tend to include two kinds of business units in the DLP selection process: content owners with sensitive data to protect, and content protectors with responsibility for enforcing controls over the data. Content owners include business units that hold and use the data. Content protectors tend to include departments like Human Resources, IT Security, Corporate Legal, Compliance, and Risk Management. Once you identify the major stakeholders you’ll want to bring them together for the next few steps.

This list covers a superset of the people who tend to be involved with selection (BU stands for “Business Unit”). Depending on the size of your organization you may need more or less, and in most cases the primary selection work will be done by 2-3 IT and IT security staff, but we suggest you include this larger list in the initial requirements generation process. The members of this team will also help obtain sample data/content for content analysis testing, and provide feedback on user interfaces and workflow if they will eventually be users of the product.

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