Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Why is it important?

Data breaches are in the news nearly every day, making data loss prevention (DLP) top-of-mind for security professionals. While DLP software has been the default answer since the 1990s for preventing data loss, it’s no longer optimal since company data lives increasingly in the cloud instead of on-premises.

What is Data Loss Prevention?

Data loss prevention (DLP) is a cyber security methodology that combines technology and best practices to prevent the exposure of sensitive information outside of an organization, especially regulated data such as personally identifiable information (PII) and compliance-related data: HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, etc. In recent years, organizations have faced a growing number of international, federal, and state regulations designed to protect consumers and control the disclosure of personal information. At the same time, companies are increasingly motivated to prevent the exposure or misuse of proprietary intellectual property that could have a significant financial impact from the loss of competitive advantage. For these reasons, data loss prevention has become an essential element in the cyber security arsenal.

How does Data Loss Prevention work?

DLP software monitors detects and blocks sensitive data from leaving an organization. That means monitoring both data entering the corporate networks, as well as data attempting to exit the network.

Most DLP software products focus on blocking actions. For example, if an employee tried to forward a business email against company policy outside the corporate domain or upload a corporate file to a consumer cloud storage service such as Dropbox, permission would be denied.

Also, DLP software can block employee computers from reading and writing to USB thumb drives to prevent unauthorized copying.

Detection primarily centers on monitoring incoming emails and looking for suspicious attachments and hyperlinks for phishing attacks. Most DLP software offers organizations the option of flagging inconsistent content for staff to manually examine or block it outright.

In the early days of DLP, security teams set the rules around detection and blocking, but those were simplistic and often circumvented. Newer software uses machine learning-based artificial intelligence, which can learn and improve the approach to detection and blocking over time.

Why DLP is important?

It is critical to implement an effective data loss prevention strategy to protect your organization’s sensitive information from being breached by criminals or accidentally leaked by careless users. Many data leaks are the result of users responding to a phishing or spear phishing email in which the sender is impersonating someone authorized to receive the data. Data can also be leaked by malware and viruses that read private data and then transmit it to a hacker.

What are the different types of DLP?

The different types of Data Loss Prevention include network DLP, endpoint DLP, and cloud DLP. Here’s a closer look at each:

• Network DLP: This type of DLP solution protects sensitive data, helps you track and analyze data moving around the network, establishes and enforces policies to mitigate the risk of data loss, and ensures regulatory compliance. Network DLP solutions can also block, flag, audit, encrypt, or quarantine suspicious activities that violate your organization’s data security policies.
• Endpoint DLP: Endpoint DLP solutions manage data security on individual endpoint devices such as computers, mobile devices, and servers. They allow you to monitor and encrypt sensitive data at rest and in transit from one device to another, regardless of where the device is located or how it connects to the organization’s resources.
• Cloud DLP: Cloud DLP solutions provide visibility and protection for sensitive data stored in the cloud and ensure it can only be accessed by authorized cloud applications. With organizations moving more workloads to the cloud to enable remote workers, Cloud DLP should be an essential part of an organization’s overall cyber security strategy.

Benefits of Data Loss Prevention

Digital data and applications are the drivers of business growth. Protecting business-critical data is vital for business survival and serves as a safety net against data loss or theft. Preventing data loss is getting harder every moment with more data to store and more places to store it. Adopting and enforcing a DLP strategy is a cornerstone of keeping your valuable data out of the wrong hands. DLP offers a helping hand to IT teams for:

Rapid recovery. Data loss prevention tools provide administrators with the requisite tools and capabilities to restore data with speed and precision. With granular search and flexible point-in-time or out-of-place recovery options, IT teams have complete control over when, where, and how to restore valuable data.

Comprehensive coverage.  DLP extends protection across data estates, offering comprehensive coverage for users, systems, applications, and environments. With data scattered in many cloud and on-premises locations – dedicated solutions deliver better peace of mind and coverage for valuable organizational data.

Lower costs. Data loss prevention saves organizations countless resources by avoiding potential liabilities, harmful exposure, fines, and lost revenue due to data loss.

The Bottom Line: DLP secures your sensitive data

The cloud and a more mobile workforce have dramatically increased the number of data protection gaps organizations have to deal with. At the same time, data regulations are expanding and growing more complex. DLP effectively addresses both these challenges, allowing you to close your security gaps and achieve compliance more easily without increasing your IT cost or complexity.