RSA, the security division of EMC, has announced its intention to acquire Tablus, a provider of data loss prevention platforms based in San Mateo, California.

Financial details were not disclosed but Tablus will add data discovery and classification, monitoring, and data loss prevention capabilities to RSA's data security portfolio, helping users to find and identify sensitive data; preventing that data from 'leaking' outside the organisation; and simplifying the management of data security through policy-driven controls.

"Information security has clearly become an information management problem. Today, many organisations struggle to establish exactly what data they have and where it all is – let alone how sensitive it is," said Art Coviello, executive vice president at EMC and president of RSA.

"The hard reality of information security is that you cannot secure what you cannot manage, and you cannot manage what you cannot find. Once completed, this acquisition will significantly expand our ability to help organisations of all sizes truly secure their data – and accelerate our mission to bring information-centric security to life."

RSA believes that data discovery and classification is a critical first step towards securing data in most organisations, as IT departments grapple with an explosion of digital information to store, manage and protect.

This challenge is complicated by the fact that sensitive data exists in three different forms – database records; messages, such as email; and loose files – and in three different contexts – at-rest on data centre storage; in-motion through the network; or in-use on laptops, mobile devices and portable storage. Data discovery and classification must directly address this complexity.

To that end, RSA will combine Tablus' products with the EMC Infoscape intelligent information management solution to create a common platform that is engineered to enable organisations to discover, classify and take policy-based action on all their data.