It has been more than a year since Gartner retired its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving, which it had published for many years. When it first happened, many of us from the compliance, e-discovery and archiving world wondered what research would come next.
Now the wait is over. On November 13, 2023, Gartner unveiled its new Market Guide for Digital Communications Governance (DCG). And it named Proofpoint as a Representative DCG solution Vendor.
Gartner says, “Gartner retired the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Information Archiving in 2022. This DCG research recognizes the rise in communication tool complexity and demand from clients to seek guidance on the selection of vendors and solutions that specialize in communications governance.” The Gartner Market Guide presents a “definition, rationale and dynamics” for the DCG market and a list of Representative Vendors.
It is now up to clients to download the Market Guide so that they can learn more about digital communications governance. And they can refer to Gartner recommendations as they look into DCG solutions that will work best for their business.
In this blog post, I go over some of initial coverage of DCG by Gartner. I also provide insights into some of the key points that are made in the new report.
Assessing a strategic planning assumption
Gartner specifies two strategic planning assumptions in the Market Guide. Here is a look at the first one:
“By 2027, 40% of enterprise customers will proactively assess workstream collaboration and meeting solution content for corporate policy and general business insights, up from less than 5% in 2023.”
We believe this seems reasonable at face value if you apply it to businesses that operate in regulated industries like financial services. But I question its validity if the intent is to expand it to all verticals.
Customers that use a DCG solution as a way to improve their litigation readiness will likely find the deployment of a supervision/surveillance solution for “corporate policy and general business insights” to be a “nice to have,” not a “must have.”
I suspect that, in general, these customers will agree to the value in principle. But they will struggle to gain executive sponsors and budget in the absence of:
- Regulatory mandates that compel relevant action, like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) or the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for financial services
- Widely accepted performance statistics, such as archive search performance or archive system availability
It will be interesting to revisit this assumption in 2027. At that point, we’ll see how much progress has been made on the regulatory and statistics fronts—and the percentage of enterprise customers.
Compliance risk versus security risk
In the Market Direction section of the report, under “Compliance risk versus security,” Gartner states, “Most frequently used for adherence to compliance use cases, solutions are expanding to broader uses in security risk.”
No vendor will do integrations simply because they are cool ideas. They need compelling use cases and business cases. However, with Proofpoint you have a single vendor that offers leading technology for both digital communications governance and security. To learn more about these platforms, check out Proofpoint Aegis threat protection and the Proofpoint Sigma information protection.
For more than 15 years, we have provided innovative solutions to address compliance use cases as well as security use cases. Most of the customers we work with who use Proofpoint Intelligent Compliance offerings are Proofpoint security customers, as well.
The use of machine learning to improve supervision and surveillance
Gartner addresses the use of these technologies in the Market Analysis section of the Market Guide, under “Supervision and surveillance capabilities.” It says, “The results can be used for improved automated monitoring/tagging, and accuracy and efficiency outcomes or results, such as a reduction in false negatives or false positives.”
We agree. But we also note that not all DCG solution providers offer these capabilities.
In 2021, we introduced Proofpoint Automate to help our Proofpoint Supervision customers reduce false positives in their review queues by up to 84%. It has been amazing to hear about the quantitative and qualitative benefits our customers have achieved with Automate and Supervision, like:
- Significantly reduced review queues
- Faster time to complete reviews of flagged items
- Fewer items to review, which helps reduce analyst fatigue—and human errors
- Faster time to risk mitigation because reviewers can focus on what matters
Next steps
We look forward to meeting with you and your team to discuss how to use Proofpoint Intelligent Compliance to address DCG requirements. Contact your compliance sales specialist today to learn more about how Proofpoint can help.
And be sure to download your complimentary copy of the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Digital Communications Compliance. You can get more insight into the DCG market and recommendations by Gartner for DCG solutions.
If you would like to find out more about the Proofpoint solutions that are mentioned in this post, visit our website.
Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Communications Compliance, Michael Hoeck, November 13, 2023.
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