CASB and DLP latency¶

Cloud Access Security Brokers deployed in proxy mode and DLP systems with inline content inspection add latency to operations that route through them. The added delay per request is typically small (50 to 200 milliseconds), but it is noticeable in interactive workflows, particularly for applications that make many small API calls.

The more significant operational issue is false positive volume. DLP rules matching on regular expressions for credit card numbers, tax identifiers, or other sensitive patterns will catch legitimate business documents that contain such data in non-sensitive contexts: audit reports, anonymised training data, financial statements. In environments with active DLP, the per-week false positive volume can reach hundreds of cases.

The typical response to high false positive volume is raising thresholds or narrowing rules. Both reduce sensitivity. At the extreme, rules that would generate too many false positives to investigate are disabled, and the protection exists on paper only.

Effective DLP requires ongoing tuning: understanding what legitimate data flows look like, writing rules narrow enough to catch anomalous transfers without flagging routine business activity. This is ongoing work. An organisation that deploys DLP and does not maintain it typically ends up with a system that generates too many alerts to action, too few alerts to trust, or both at different times. Last updated: 12 June 2026