While Microsoft and Cisco haven’t bought DLP start-ups, they’re partnering with RSA to use RSA’s DLP classification technology. The first fruit of the RSA DLP alliance has been Cisco's of DLP into Cisco IronPort.

“We’ve been an early adopter of a number of RSA technologies,” says Erik Heidt, assistant vice president and manager of information technology at Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank, which uses IronPort for gateway e-mail security filtering.

Heidt plans to make use of the DLP capability in IronPort as part of an enterprise-wide DLP strategy, though he acknowledges “it could be time-consuming to get data policies written for this.”

Wes Wright, chief technology officer at Seattle Children’s Hospital, sees DLP as the next step to augment the encryption, which is based on GuardianEdge, that the healthcare organization recently deployed for endpoint protection. It seems likely the hospital will make the investment in DLP because management is getting behind it.

"You want to be able to set policies on what’s allowed, and you want to block,” says Wright. The hospital knows where patient health information is stored but having DLP controls on what happens to it after authorized personnel access it would be a big plus.