Mike Maddision, UK Head of Security and Privacy Services, Deloitte, said: “2010 is definitely going to be the year for DLP. In 25 years in the industry, I've never seen this intense groundswell of interest around a specific technology before. From the FTSE to SMEs, interest is across the board. A key reason for this is that CEOs really understand DLP and the benefits of deployment.”

However, Richard Turner, Clearswift CEO, was less bullish: “There's a lot of hype over DLP at the moment, but I think that the market will fragment increasingly throughout 2010, as we have seen for other technologies. We've gradually seen a fundamental hardening of the network layer, and more secure OS builds, built-in encryption, etc all moving away from the standalone technology solution."

 A Gartner report from earlier this year agreed, stating that DLP endpoint commoditisation would occur by 2011, causing a 50 per cent price drop. “While pricing is expected to drop, adoption of endpoint content-aware DLP will rise significantly during this time period,” claimed the report.

Although a stream of data breaches at the government and finance levels have clearly played a part in promoting the importance of data awareness leak prevention technologies, the Gartner report notes that: “Inquiry data shows that many enterprises are still struggling to define their strategic content-aware DLP needs clearly and comprehensively.”

 Turner claims that the lack of market maturity may be down to the technology itself, as well as the overall market. "Most of the larger DLP providers at the moment are pretty good at alerting when something has left the network, but not so good at stopping it in real-time. I believe that this type of monitoring and intellegence will increasingly be built-in to the network, forcing vendors to differentiate out the high-value section of DLP, data discovery, or face failure”, continued Turner.

The market for content-aware DLP technologies will have reached $300million by the end of 2009, according to Gartner estimates.