In the past year, however, the hype surrounding DLP has died down a bit. Still, the role of technology in any enterprise data protection strategy has not diminished; instead, a more complete vision of what DLP should be has emerged.

Meridian Health, based in Neptune, N.J., was one of the early adopters of DLP products. The health care network bought into the technology in the second half of 2006, before the marketing hype began in earnest. The idea was to get ahead of the data protection requirements of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), as well as New Jersey's Identity Theft Prevention Act.

The experiment has worked well for Meridian, which started with technology from Tablus prior to that vendor's acquisition by EMC. Still, there were hurdles to jump.

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