If you’re reading this, you may have heard of Harmonic but aren’t entirely sure what we do. Is it AI security? Is it next-gen DLP? Is it something else entirely?
Realistically, there’s only so much you can show on demo videos or write about on the website. Sometimes you need to get an outsider to take a look and describe it in their own words.
So that’s exactly what we did. We engaged with the folks at ESG to look at Harmonic themselves, chat with our customers, and validate our product does what we say it does.
Download the report here, or read on for an overview of the findings.
The Methodology
We engaged with ESG to evaluate how Harmonic Protect helps organizations safeguard sensitive data and prevent its spread and misuse, especially via generative AI applications. As part of this ESG also considered case studies and interviewed Harmonic customers to understand how they’ve benefited from using Harmonic Protect to safeguard their generative AI use.
The Problem Space: Growing Governance Initiatives to Solve Widespread Pain Points
Before we get into any of the findings from the assessment of Harmonic, there are a few interesting nuggets that came out of an ESG survey.
First, AI governance is clearly a priority for security teams; 96% are “either already enforcing a specific governance structure for the use of generative AI or are currently developing one”.
To this end, what exactly are organizations doing?
- 86% of organizations report that they have or are blocking access to one or more generative AI sites.
- 82% of organizations are concerned about data leakage as employees increasingly use generative AI
- 82% of organizations are unsure if any employees are accessing generative AI sites or what they are doing on the sites.
Here at Harmonic, we’re helping security teams to enable their employees to confidently use GenAI without any of these data leakage concerns.
Reducing The Noise: 96% Fewer Alerts Than Existing DLP
The “secret sauce” of Harmonic is our pre-trained data protection models. We have dozens of models that can understand sensitive data of all kinds – even in highly unstructured data. This means that we no longer have to make do with regular expressions; we can now detect far more sensitive data types with far higher accuracy.
As one customer put it, “it would take forever with our current tooling to try and get feature parity [with Harmonic Protect] or even come close to it. We’d be writing regexes forever.”
To give further context, one customer compared Harmonic with their legacy DLP vendor:
“Over the previous month, Harmonic Protect had 96% fewer alerts than the existing data loss prevention (DLP) solutions, showing a massive reduction in false positives. In one case, Harmonic Protect prevented sensitive loan information from being used in a generative AI prompt. This company is convinced that no other solution would have detected this data because it didn’t have any information regular expressions would detect.”
Speed to Value: The Easy Button for Data Protection
One of the enduring challenges of DLP and DSPM is the sheer length of time it takes for the projects. Even the most innovative tools take months to realize any value. This puts security leaders in a tricky position; they know they want to put controls in place to manage these GenAI risks, but they don’t want to embark on a never-ending DLP project.
Our guiding principle is that we want to ensure that we are the easy button for data protection.
Another customer shed light on how we’ve made this a reality:
“Installation was easy because it was just a browser plugin. Instead of needing servers and cloud environments to begin using it, you install the browser extension and within days have it rolled out and gain visibility into the entire environment. We got up and running without a big headache, a big budget, or big consulting efforts.”
ESG’s research found that the “simple and fast deployment, based on its browser extension model, saved approximately 75% on project costs, resources, and time” when compared with a standard DLP tool.
Summary
With Harmonic, we’re making some big claims about how we are taking new approaches to shape the future of data protection.
This ESG research shows that, after just one year, we’re already giving tangible outcomes and benefits to our customers.
“If your organization wants to take advantage of generative AI applications without risking sensitive and confidential information leakage, Enterprise Strategy Group recommends you consider Harmonic Protect".
Check out the full ESG report here.
.png)