In the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise DLP, Gartner estimated that the total data loss prevention market would reach $1.3 billion in 2020. Now, updated forecasts show a likely $2.64 billion market size in 2020. The DLP market is not new, but it has evolved to include managed services, cloud functionality, and advanced threat protection amongst other things. All of this, coupled with the upward trend in giant data breaches, has seen a massive uptick in DLP adoption as a means to protect sensitive data. Here are 7 trends that are driving the wider adoption of DLP:

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1. The Growth of the CISO Role: More companies have hired and are hiring Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), who often report to the CEO. CEOs want to know the game plan for preventing data leaks. DLP provides clear business value in this regard and gives CISOs the necessary reporting capabilities to provide regular updates to the CEO.

2. Evolving Compliance Mandates: Global data protection regulations constantly change and your organization needs to be adaptable and prepared. Within the past couple years, lawmakers in the EU and New York State, respectively, have passed the GDPR and NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation, both of which have tightened data protection requirements. DLP solutions allow organizations the flexibility to evolve with changing global regulations.

3. There are More Places to Protect Your Data: Increased use of the cloud, complicated supply chain networks, and other services you no longer have full control over has made protecting your data more complex. Visibility into the events and context of events that surround your data before it leaves your organization is important in preventing your sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands.

4. Data Breaches are Frequent and Large: Adversaries from nation states, cyber criminals and malicious insiders are targeting your sensitive data for a variety motives, such as corporate espionage, personal financial gain, and political advantage. DLP can protect against all kinds of adversaries, malicious or not. Within just the past couple of years, there have been thousands of data breaches and many more security incidents. Billions of records have been lost in giant data breaches such as: the database misconfiguration that leaked nearly 200 million US voter records in 2015, the Equifax data breach that kept getting bigger, and the Yahoo breach that affected 3 billion users. These are only a few of the many headliners that emphasize the need to protect your organization’s data.

5. Your Organization’s Stolen Data is Worth More: Stolen data is often sold on the Dark Web, where individuals and groups can purchase and use it for their own benefit. With certain data types selling for up to a few thousand dollars, there is a clear financial incentive for data theft.

6. There’s More Data to Steal: The definition of what is sensitive data has expanded over the years. Sensitive data now includes intangible assets, such as pricing models and business methodologies. From 1975 to 2015, the amount of intangible assets grew from 17% of the S&P 500 market value to 84%, according to Ocean Tomo’s Intangible Asset Market Value Study. These assets also hit a record $21 trillion in 2018. This means your organization has a lot more data to protect.

7. There’s a Security Talent Shortage: The security talent shortage is not going away anytime soon and you’ve probably already felt its impact on your own organization. In fact, in an ESG and ISSA survey from 2017, 43% of respondents said their organizations had been impacted by the shortage. The shortage is only getting worse with 3.5 million unfilled security positions projected by 2021. Managed DLP services act as remote extensions of your team to fill that personnel gap.