Forcepoint blocks the file someone emails to a personal account. It does not see the researcher who pulls that same file in small chunks, off-hours, over a transfer connection your policy approved on purpose. Those are different failures, and they need different tools. Most regulated shops that compare us end up keeping both.
Forcepoint enforces policy. Hilt watches runtime data movement. The two sentences sound close enough to compete. They are not. What follows is where the two overlap, where Hilt sees a thing Forcepoint was never built to see, and where Forcepoint keeps the work Hilt has no claim to.
What Forcepoint does well
Forcepoint is a mature data and web security platform. Its DLP enforces policy on data in motion and at rest across the channels users exfiltrate through: email, web uploads, USB, cloud apps, endpoints. Its web and SWG products control where users go and what comes back. Forcepoint ONE pulls CASB, ZTNA, and SWG into one console under shared policy.
The strength is enforcement. Write the rule and Forcepoint enforces it. Block a file type leaving over webmail. Quarantine an upload that matches a credit-card pattern. Stop a USB write of a document tagged confidential. Forcepoint classifies the content, matches it against the policy, and acts inline at the channel. For a danger you can name in advance, that is the right tool.
A large share of real loss is not subtle, and that is the case Forcepoint owns. Someone emails the customer list to a personal account. Someone drags a tagged file toward Dropbox. Forcepoint catches both, at the moment of the attempted move. Hilt does not provide that, and does not try to.
Where the rule runs out
Every Forcepoint policy answers one question: was this specific action permitted by the rule. The rule fires on a match against a content signature, a destination, a channel, a tag. Enforcement reaches exactly as far as you can write the danger down ahead of time. No further.
Your most valuable data leaves on access you granted on purpose. The credentials are real. The channel is approved. The classification matches a sanctioned business process. Each move is permitted, so every channel control correctly lets it through. The breach is not in any single move. It is in the pattern across them.
Picture a researcher pulling proprietary code in small chunks, off-hours, over an approved transfer connection that carries legitimate data movement every day. No content signature trips, because the content is what that channel is for. No destination rule trips, because the destination is on the allow list. No tag rule trips, because the files are not the ones the policy was written to watch. Forcepoint did not fail. It enforced the policy correctly, and the policy had nothing to say, because nobody can write a rule for a permitted pattern before they have seen it.
That is the structural ceiling of enforcement, not a Forcepoint defect. A control that acts on a rule cannot act on the absence of one. The dangerous pattern lives between the rules.
Where Hilt adds a layer
Hilt is runtime Data Movement Governance. It does not write or enforce DLP policy, and it is not a channel control. It watches data movement at the kernel, metadata only by default, off the path, single-tenant inside your own cloud. One lightweight collector per host, roughly 0.1% of one core and 4 to 8 MB of memory, never inline.
What changes is the unit of analysis. Forcepoint judges each action against a rule. Hilt resolves each move to a probabilistic, source-dependent identity: which user, which job, which destination, and whether this fits what that identity normally does. The baseline is built on the movement itself, not on the policy.
So when the researcher copies the code, the deviation surfaces across layers at once. The job is unusual for her identity. The access is a bulk read of high-value paths inside a short window. The volume is unusual for that channel, approved channel and all. One signal alone is noise. Stacked, they are a pattern, and a pattern is a case, not an alert. Hilt writes the case with the identity and the job behind it, and when the move warrants action, it responds with host-level network isolation, quarantine from the control plane. It never blocks, drops, or alters traffic, because it never sits in the path of the move.
Notice what Hilt never has to do to see this. It does not inspect content by default. It needs no signature for the proprietary code, no tag on the files, no rule for the destination. It sees that the pattern is wrong without reading your data. Content-aware inspection is there when you want it, but it is not the price of admission. Forcepoint's model classifies content and matches policy, so that layer was never on the table for it.
Where Hilt does not replace Forcepoint
This is the part comparison pages skip. Hilt does not enforce DLP policy. If you need to block a file type leaving over webmail, quarantine an upload that matches a content signature, or control web destinations and SaaS access, that is Forcepoint's job, and you should keep it doing that job. Hilt has no opinion on your acceptable-use policy, runs no web gateway, and never stands inline at the channel to enforce a rule at the moment of the move.
The two work on different planes. Forcepoint enforces the rules you can write, at the channel, inline. Hilt governs the movement you cannot reduce to a rule, at the kernel, off the path. Forcepoint stops the loud attempted exfiltration before it leaves. Hilt catches the patient, permitted pattern that no rule was written to stop. Pull either one and you open a real gap.
How to think about running both
Split the work by question. "Should this specific action be allowed" is policy enforcement, and Forcepoint owns it. "Does this data movement fit how this identity normally moves data" is runtime governance, and Hilt owns it.
Run this test against your own environment. Take a move you would call a worst case: the researcher above, or a service account reading far more than its job needs over a sanctioned pipeline. Ask whether any rule you could write today would catch it without also flagging the legitimate version of that same move a hundred times a day. If the honest answer is no, that move sits in the blind spot, and it sits there by design, because it is permitted. Enforcement cannot reach it. A behavioral baseline on the movement itself can.
For regulated industries, one more thing. Hilt runs single-tenant inside your own cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure, or Ali Cloud. The path from kernel event to written case stays in your account. Events never leave it. You add the runtime layer without adding a new place your most sensitive data has to travel.
Not a replacement decision
Forcepoint enforces the policy you can express, and it does that well. Hilt sits underneath the policy and watches the runtime data movement, catching the dangerous pattern across permitted moves that nobody could write a rule for in advance. Keep the enforcement. Close the gap it was never built to cover.
If you want to see where the runtime layer sits next to your Forcepoint deployment, what the collector reads, and what it deliberately leaves alone, the fastest path is a 30-minute call, engineer to engineer. We will walk through a real move from your environment and show you where the pattern would surface.