About the Customer
Jabil, a Fortune 200 company, helps bring electronics products to market faster and more cost-effectively by providing complete product supply-chain management, creating competitive advantage for their customers at every step in the value chain. Jabil is built on a foundation of 180,000 employees across 90 manufacturing plants in 23 countries.
Challenge
In 2013, Jabil’s CISO uncovered a critical gap hidden beneath the company’s rapid global expansion: Security practices had not kept pace with growth. Essential data protection processes were missing, IT systems lacked standardization, and while workstations were secured, they did not meet the level of protection the security team believed was appropriate for the evolving risk landscape. The implications were significant. A breach exposing customer intellectual property or violating NDAs could result in substantial financial penalties and long-term reputational damage. At the same time, Jabil’s own sensitive assets — such as proprietary supplier pricing agreements and internal deal structures — were equally at risk.
Recognizing cybersecurity not just as a defensive necessity but as a potential competitive advantage, the InfoSec team faced the reality that the organization needed a transformation quickly. With no years to build it internally, they knew external expertise would be essential to close the gap.
Defined Critical Success Factors
- Identify and locate critical IP as defined by each business unit and its customers
- Increase visibility on data movement across users, locations, and applications
- Apply new protection controls across autonomous regional operations
- Implement a tiered control set ranging from a baseline security to higher, more restrictive levels
- Rely on security experts to administer data protection, freeing the internal team to focus on data governance
Solution
Jabil selected the Fortra Managed Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution as the clear frontrunner, achieving full deployment in under three months, faster than any alternative could deliver. The managed service model allowed Jabil to redirect internal focus toward strengthening data governance, while Fortra assumed responsibility for 24/7 global program operations and administration.
The approach aligned with Jabil’s existing experience in managed services, including cloud-based web proxy and single sign-on solutions. This familiarity helped accelerate adoption and reinforced a strategic shift already underway: moving from perimeter-based security to an endpoint-centric model. With Fortra DLP, Jabil gained deep contextual visibility into how data moved across the organization, enabling more precise and actionable control.
At Jabil, intellectual property is defined by each customer’s specific requirements for protection. To support this flexibility, business units were empowered to classify IP based on how it was used, where it was stored, who could access it, and which applications interacted with it. A tiered control framework established a corporate security baseline while allowing enhanced protections for employees handling more sensitive data.
To ensure privacy was maintained, violation logs were aggregated and filtered using metadata rather than raw content, protecting employee confidentiality while preserving security insight.
Following a successful pilot deployment of 3,000 agents, Jabil rapidly scaled to 49,000 agents worldwide, completing global rollout in under 90 days from initial engagement with Fortra.
Results
Jabil gained comprehensive visibility into data access and usage across 52,000 workstations, quickly revealing that sensitive information was being copied to USB drives far more frequently than anticipated. In response, external storage devices were placed under strict control, requiring registration, while sensitive files were automatically encrypted to prevent unauthorized exposure. The organization also introduced more secure, behavior-driven workflows that actively prompted users when risky actions were detected, shifting security from a passive control to an active guide for safer decisions.
What emerged after choosing Fortra DLP was a fundamental shift in mindset, as security was no longer just a safeguard, but a competitive advantage embedded into how the business operated.