What is Data Loss Prevention?
What is DLP? Data loss prevention software is used to keep sensitive data safe by monitoring and controlling endpoint activities, filtering data streams on corporate networks, and monitoring data in the cloud.
Data Leak Prevention Technology
DLP Data loss prevention is a strategy that helps organizations protect personal information, IP, and visibility of data.
- If you collect and store customer data, such as personal information or payment card info, then your company is likely subject to compliance regulations like HIPAA for PHI or GDPR for EU residents. You can use DLP to identify sensitive data and monitor activities surrounding it.
- Your organization is trying to get a better understanding of where data goes and how it's used. A comprehensive enterprise DLP solution can provide visibility into your network, endpoints, cloud storage drives.
There are many different ways DLP can help organizations. One is with insider threats, another is Office 365 data security, and the third type of use case would be user behavior analysis.
Why DLP Data Loss Prevention?
7 Trends Driving data loss protection
The DLP market has been growing rapidly for years. It includes everything from managed services to cloud functionality, and it's seen an uptick in adoption because of the number of data breaches that have happened recently.
- More CEOs are hiring CISOs to protect their company's data. These individuals typically report directly to the CEO, and they work with DLP software for regular reporting.
- New data protection regulations are being passed around the world, and you need to be prepared for them. You can use DLP solutions to help evolve with these changes.
- Increased use of the cloud, complicated supply chain networks, and other services you no longer have full control over has made protecting your data more complex. It's important to know who is accessing your sensitive information before it leaves your company.
- Data breaches are frequent and large. Adversaries from nation states, cyber criminals, or malicious insiders will target your data for various motives such as corporate espionage or personal financial gain. Data Loss Prevention can protect against all of these adversaries, whether they’re intentional or not.
- Stolen data is often sold on the Dark Web for a few thousand dollars. There's no question that this provides motivation to steal information.
- Intangible assets, such as pricing models and business methodologies, are now considered sensitive data. This means there is a lot more to protect during the hiring process.
- There is a shortfall of security professionals. There are 3.5 million unfilled positions projected by 2021, and 43% of companies have felt the impact to their own organization.
DLP information security; DLP solutions
- With a main objective in place, it’s easier to know which type of DLP deployment architecture is the most appropriate. The four types are Endpoint DLP, Network DLPS Discovery and Cloud.
- It is not only the IT security team's responsibility to make DLP decisions. It should be a company-wide decision, which includes input from top executives like the CFO and CEO.
- Before I was able to get started with DLP vendors, I had a lot of questions. What types of deployment architectures are offered? Do they support Windows, Linux and OS X with feature parity? What deployment options do they offer? Do they provide managed services or not needed at all for my business needs? With this in mind, what kind of threats should be considered: internal or external ones only; both inside and outside the organization's walls; data protection from structured files as well as unstructured documents such as PDFs and spreadsheets.; self-classification by users rather than classification performed by an administrator.?
- What options do I have when it comes to my deployment?
- Do they have the same features for Windows, Linux, and OS X?
- What are the company's deployment options? Do they provide managed services?
- What is your threat profile? Are you focused on defending against external or internal threats, or both?
- Which inspection and classification system do you want? Do your users need to be able to classify documents on their own, or is it a mix of different methods?
- Do you prefer to protect structured or unstructured data?
- Will you be able to monitor and control data movement based on policies or events? Will this system provide the ability for user-based monitoring of data movements
- What compliance regulations are you obligated to follow? What new ones do you expect coming up in the future?"
- Who are the technological partners of your organization, and what would you like to integrate with DLP?
- When do you want to start implementing your DLP program?
- Are you going to need more people on your team in order to manage this DLP program?
- Create clearly defined roles and responsibilities for the individuals in your DLP program. This will help provide checks and balances.
- It's important to start with a clear plan before you begin. It can be helpful to take the project approach, where your goal is focused on solving one problem at a time or it can help if you use the data visibility approach and focus on discovery of any sensitive data in order to control egress.
- Meet with the heads of your company to discuss data protection policies. This will help ensure that different business units are aware of how they might be impacted by these policies and what is expected in them.
- It's important to document your processes so you can be consistent with how policies are applied, keep records of reviews and provide useful information when hiring new people.
- Determine what metrics you want to monitor and share with your business leaders. Determine how successful your DLP program is, then try to improve it by focusing on the right KPIs.
- DLP is not a product, it's an ongoing process. You can get quick wins with installing the tool, but understanding that DLP is about constantly monitoring data will help you have lasting success.
Data leakage prevention; Experts Weigh in on Data Loss Prevention
Here are the basics of data leakage prevention.
DLP information security: The IT department has a lot of power over data protection, but everyone in the company influences it as well.
When building a case for data loss prevention, you must involve the leaders within your company who are stakeholders. They will be able to provide input on what needs to be done in order to protect their information.
When you’re looking to build a case for implementing an anti-fraud solution, it's important to involve the leaders within your company who will be affected by and have input in this decision. Bring these people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise into discussions during the discovery process so they can ask questions about what is being proposed.
Encryption is important because it's the first line of defense against cyber attacks. It protects everything from credit cards to passwords, and there would be a lot more risk if we didn't have encryption.
Encryption is a necessary tool for protecting your data from hackers, criminals, and foreign governments. The value of encryption cannot be overstated because it protects sensitive information that would otherwise not be safe.
One of the biggest threats to a company is if someone who works there decides to do something illegal. The best way for companies to prevent this from happening is by being proactive and training employees on what they can and cannot legally do as part of their work.
Protect Your Organization from Cybersecurity Threats
SecurityStudio helps information security leaders at organizations ensure they’re protected against cybersecurity threats, stay insurable, and legally defensible with our risk assessment and risk management software. Schedule a demo to learn how we can help.