What is data loss prevention?
The threat landscape is an ever-changing one as the number of cyber attacks continues to increase, data exfiltration now accounts for 70% of ransomware attacks and insiders are responsible for 30% of all data breaches. As a result, companies are constantly looking for ways to reduce the risk of sensitive data being leaked outside the enterprise. And with so many potential weaknesses, it is necessary for organizations to implement controls and solutions that mitigate risks as effectively as possible.
To do this, the most common solution companies turn to is data loss prevention.
What is data loss prevention?
In its broadest terms, data loss prevention (DLP) is a set of tools and processes that enable companies to detect and prevent data breaches, exfiltration and malicious destruction or misuse of sensitive data. DLP solutions allow you to monitor and analyze data traffic on your network for potential anomalies, including inspecting data sent via email or instant messaging, analyzing data flows on your network, verifying how data is used on a managed endpoint, and monitoring data at rest on local file servers or applications and cloud storage.
Organizations typically use DLP in the following scenarios:
To protect personally identifiable information (PII) and comply with regulatory requirements specific to the organization’s field of operation.
– To protect intellectual property that is critical to the organization.
– To help protect the data in cloud systems.
– To help secure an increasingly mobile and disparate workforce
– To strengthen security in BYOD environments.
DLP solutions will also produce reports that can help the organization comply with regulations.
What are the complexities and requirements of data protection?
To prevent inappropriate leakage of sensitive data, data types must be established, data must be identified, rules must be defined based on role and data type, implementations must be tested to ensure a balance between security and productivity, and more. Therefore, you need to ensure that your DLP efforts are working to meet your data protection requirements and that any potential DLP solution can help you achieve this.
SANS provides a fairly comprehensive list of key requirements to consider:
– Discovery, retention, search: scans for data at rest (on endpoints, servers and file shares), in use and in motion (on the network, via email and web traffic, as well as any data being copied). on external devices).
– Monitoring: discover, identify, correlate, correlate, analyze and log every instance of movement or use of sensitive data.
– Alerting: define and implement actions to be taken when a breach or incident is detected based on content (markers/logging), context (how the data behaves), application, user and location.
– Enforcement: Define and implement actions (allow, block, reject, quarantine, encrypt, delete and remove) to be taken for compliance when a breach or incident is detected based on content (markers/log), context (how the data behaves), application, user and location.
– Rules support: Provide the ability to centrally define, manage and enforce flexible rules, as well as automate remediation actions based on policy violation.
The key benefits of DLP
With so many business operations today relying on data, managing it and knowing what’s confidential is a big challenge: you can’t protect your most sensitive data until you know where that data is.
A DLP solution will help you to:
– Establish what data you have.
– Discover where sensitive data resides on your network
– Help you implement specific policies about your most sensitive data
– Automatically prevent attempts to copy or send sensitive data without authorization
– Provide complete visibility into what is actually happening to the data on your networks.
– Provide complete visibility into data leaving the network.
– Create an effective barrier against internal and external threats.
If you are serious about implementing a DLP, first consider hiring an expert consultant to advise you on everything from strategy and requirements, to technologies and environmental changes. This will help ensure that you achieve the highest possible protection for your most critical data.
Why redborder? redborder offers a single, end-to-end solution that provides visibility into the entire network and all traffic to avoid blind spots and shadow IT problems.
