Deployment Guide › Content Registration › How to Set Up Content Agents

How to Set Up Content Agents

A registered content agent can quickly detect when a user tries to send or copy a protected file. To do this, it compares the file's digital fingerprint with the fingerprints of files that it is protecting.

To roll out content agents across your CA DLP enterprise

1. Create your content agents. You do this in the Administration console.

   For each agent, you must specify which files it protects and its index type.

   • For Text Detection agents, you must specify the agent accuracy and detection thresholds.
   • For Exact File Detection agents, you do not need to specify these parameters.
2. Build an index for each content agent.

   The index contains fingerprints of the files you want the agent to protect. In technical terms, CA DLP generates the index by running specialized FSA scanning job to collate the digital fingerprints. It then creates the index files on the FSA machine that is performing the scan. 

3. Publish the content agent.

   This process pushes the content index files from the FSA machine onto the CMS and makes a fully functioning content agent available to your policy engines and endpoint agents. 

   Note: Until an index has been built and the content agent has been published, the agent cannot be used in user policy. That is, any content agent trigger that uses an unpublished agent will be unable to detect fingerprinted files.

4. Set up content agent triggers in your user policies. Content agent triggers are available for email, Data At Rest, Data In Motion and Web triggers. These triggers specify one or more content agents.

   When CA DLP applies policy to a file (for example, when it detects an unauthorized email attachment), the content agent generates a fingerprint of the file and then compares this fingerprint with those in its index.

   If the fingerprints match, CA DLP infers that the file must be protected and the trigger fires.

   Note: Content agents cannot reliably detect some file types (such as spreadsheets) when they are printed. See below for details.